Democratic legitimacy for the EU is problematic if it is seen as a future nation-state. If instead the EU were seen as … fragmented democracy in which the EU level assures governance and the people through effective governing and interest …

- which, in turn, depends on the support of socially shared legitimacy beliefs. In Western constitutional democracies, such … voluntary compliance of its member states. What matters primarily, therefore, is the compliance-legitimacy relationship between … the Union and its member states - which, however, is normatively constrained by the basic compliance-legitimacy …

The function of legitimacy is to ensure voluntary compliance with unwelcome exercises of governing authority. Since … not have to face its citizens directly. It follows that the legitimacy of European governance ought to be conceptualized … at two levels. At one level, the legitimacy of member states is decisive for the compliance of individuals and firms …

majority rule at the European level. In order to ensure democratic legitimacy, however, majoritarian legislation would have to …

We study whether a democracy improves a measure of individual wellbeing; human heights. Drawing on individual …-level datasets, we test the hypothesis using a battery of eight different measures of democracy and derived averages, and include … models accounting for several confounders, regional and cohort fixed effects. We document that democracy - or its quality …