Der Aufsatz zeigt anhand zahlreicher Beispiele und quantitativer Analysen, dass internationale Organisationen – mehr als alle anderen staatlichen Institutionen – ein extremes Kontrolldefizit aufweisen. Umfragen belegen, dass sie andere Interessen als die Bürger haben. Sie können diese...

The development of the constitution must be based on the rule of law. Direct democratic rights allow citizens to participate in the amendment process. The direct democratic process of institutional change is theoretically and empirically analyzed. A number of counter arguments and issues for a...

The present difficulties of democratic welfare states in Europe are often ascribed to economic "globalization", that is to the world-wide integration of markets for capital, goods and services which has eliminated national control over boundary-crossing economic transactions, and which therefore...

Although analyses of democracy and governance may be complementary rather than in conflict, they are not identical. This article compares the EU criteria for evaluating applicants for membership with those of democracy indexes. It uses data from the 13- country New Europe Barometer surveys of...

The European Monetary Union (EMU) has removed crucial instruments of macroeconomic management from the control of democratically accountable governments. Worse still, the EMU has systemically caused destabilizing macroeconomic imbalances that member states found difficult or impossible to...

Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...

In this paper, the introduction of direct-democratic decision-making in all EU decisions is considered when it is feasible without prohibitively increasing decision-making costs. We start with the contractarian argument that each constitution is a contract joining the citizens of a state and...