This paper asks how ex ante and ex post control mechanisms structuring the involvement of national parliaments in EU policy-formulation affect the size and scope of conflict of parliamentary debates. The direct and indirect effects of control mechanisms are assessed in a comparative case study...

This article addresses the critical issue of how constitutional designing of the EU is related to the expression of collective identities. A European collective identity is perceived in terms of the discursive representation of the underlying demos of a European democracy. Against the common...

A key feature of democratic political systems is their ability to collect, generate and disseminate information and thereby to improve policies and practices. Multi-lateral institutions in general, and the European Union in particular, are often seen as decision making systems where technocratic...

Membership in the European Union has for several decades figured as one of, if not the, most politically divisive issues in Norway. The question of Norwegian EU membership has been turned down in two popular referenda, and three governments have faltered on the issue. Since 1994, through the EEA...

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...

Europe has been transformed from an order of largely independent nation-states to an integrated order with some capacity to rule in the name of all. The European integration process has resulted in a set of institutions premised on a complex mixture of supranational, transnational and...

This article critically examines the democratic theory that informs the German Federal Constitutional Court’s Lisbon Treaty ruling. This is needed because the ruling is ambiguous with regard to what democracy for what Union. In order to analyse the ruling we establish three models of what...

The capability approach developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen has received substantial attention in recent years, in philosophical exchanges as well as in more applied discussions on policy-making, in particular in developing countries, but lately also in Western countries, including...

In this paper, we confront some commonly held assumptions and objections with regard to the feasibility of deliberation in a transnational and plurilingual setting. To illustrate our argument, we rely on a solid set of both quantitative and qualitative data from Europolis, a transnational...

Equal pay for work of equal value is a fundamental principle in European Union (EU) law and so in the European Economic Area (EEA) Agreement. The paper takes as its point of departure the debate in Norway on the interpretation of EEA equal pay legislation, and relates this debate to the broader...