What is the explanatory potential of deliberative democracy? This paper analyses collective decision-making in a political context with reference to warrants , which explain the conversion from premises to conclusion and with reference to the deontological powers of status functions . The first...

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 is the explanatory potential of deliberative democracy? This paper analyses collective decision-making in a political context with reference to warrants , which explain the conversion from premises to conclusion and with reference to the deontological powers of status functions . The first...

The EU’s foreign and security policy is often criticised for being undemocratic. The article addresses this contention from the perspective of deliberative democracy. The focus is on the procedural qualities of the second pillar decision-making processes as it is not only the quality of the...

How can the EU rectify its legitimacy deficit? On the basis of three logics of political integration we identify explicit strategies for how the legitimacy deficit of the EU can be remedied. The first strategy amounts to a scaling down of the ambitions of the polity-makers in the EU. If pursued...

Laeken has ushered in the first continent-wide debate, on the issue of a European constitution. An important question is whether this amounts to Europe’s constitutional moment in a critical normative sense. To address this we first distil out five core lessons from the Laeken experience. This...

The European Union is presently at a major crossroads. The Laeken process which launched the EU onto an explicit constitution-making process, has ground to a halt after the negative referendum results in France and the Netherlands. The European Council at its 16-17 June 2005 meeting decided to...

The EU is often labelled a unique entity. This assertion is more the product of assessments of its institutional character than on the nature of its social constituency, i.e. the structure of demands and expectations that citizens and groups place on the EU. Determining the character of the...

The negative referendum results in France and the Netherlands have been construed as signs of a deep gap between the European Union’s leaders and its people(s). Treaty-making/change in the European Union has historically been conducted through an intergovernmental, executive-style approach,...

What kind of democracy does the EU require and what model of deliberative democracy can account for post-national legitimacy? The author contends that democracy can only prevail with egalitarian procedures of law making in place through which the citizens can influence the laws that affect them....