The role of parliaments and parliamentarians has been at the core of the discussions on the 'democratic deficit' in the EU. From being the 'losers' of European integration, representative institutions have during the last decade played an increasingly more prominent role in governing Europe. In...

This paper analyses the prominence, content and justifications of Euroscepticism as a form of EU legitimacy contestation. Support of and opposition to European integration have so far been mainly measured through the positions of political parties or citizens’ attitudes through public opinion...

This paper analyses the prominence, content and justifications of Euroscepticism as a form of EU legitimacy contestation. Support of and opposition to European integration have so far been mainly measured through the positions of political parties or citizens’ attitudes through public opinion...

This paper evaluates the mediatizing potential of the internet on the politics of European integration and the process of enhancing the democratic legitimacy of the European Union (EU), i.e. the ways in which online media participate or interfere with the democratization of the EU by either...

In this paper, Espen D. H. Olsen and Hans-Jörg Trenz confront some commonly held assumptions and objections with regard to the feasibility of deliberation in a transnational and pluri-lingual setting. To illustrate our argument, we rely on a solid set of both quantitative and qualitative data...

In this paper, Espen D. H. Olsen and Hans-Jörg Trenz confront some commonly held assumptions and objections with regard to the feasibility of deliberation in a transnational and pluri-lingual setting. To illustrate our argument, we rely on a solid set of both quantitative and qualitative data...

This paper shows that the main pattern of European democratisation has unfolded along the lines of an EU organised as a multilevel system of representative parliamentary government and not as a system of deliberative governance as the transnationalists propound. But the multilevel EU has...

What kind of political system is the European Union and what will it be like in the future? Questions about the present and the future are hard to keep apart as the EU is an evolving project, currently engaged in the twin processes of enlargement and constitution making. When discussing the...

Quantitative research in the field of European Union (EU) politics has focused on the internal dynamics of either the Council of Ministers (the Council) or the European Parliament (the Parliament). Theoretical accounts of bicameralism in the EU have understood the Parliament as a unitary actor....

Over the past half century, the European Parliament has undergone a remarkable transformation from an assembly endowed with supervisory powers to a directly-elected legislator, co-deciding most secondary legislation on equal footing with the Council. Furthermore, while human rights were not...