The paper suggests a practice turn in the analysis of political legitimacy. Current social science research on political legitimacy suffers twofold. First, it shows an undue (silent) impact of an ethics-first perspective. Second, empirical approaches to political legitimacy mostly focus on...

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...

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...

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 sociology contribute to the understanding of the social and political transformations that are affecting contemporary Europe? The article proposes that sociological accounts of European integration should focus around the basic problem of internal differentiation and external adaptation...

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...

This article presents some key research questions and discusses some advancements and controversies in the field of implementation studies in the European Union. In addition to calling for the further development of reliable quantitative indicators, the article suggests three issues worth...

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the type of allegiance that the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union is based on. Charters as Bills of Rights establish or entrench fundamental rights, democracy and the rule of law, and the relevant sense of allegiance and attachment...

Who provides the European Union with information? Are these sources of information biased? Who are excluded and who are included? What can the informational bias tell us about decision making in the European Union? The paper examines patterns of participation in the large and organized expert...