Jon Elster has a clear view of the role of norms and impartiality in collective decision making processes, but does not ascribe to them the power to explain action. Hence, the paradox: If it is only public reasons that can justify outcomes, how can private desires be the causes of the same...

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...

Scholarly debate on party-based Euroscepticism centers on the questions of how to define, measure and explain Euroscepticism. As a starting point, this paper observes that studies on Euroscepticism either focus on the positions of individual parties on issues of European integration or on the...

The state’s mode of existence is still a problem to political science analysis. How can we decide if a political order (for example the EU) is a state or not? This paper discusses the ontological quality of the state and what follows from that to its analysis. It is suggested to view the state...