The European Parliament is the only actor in the European Union democratically elected. From this point of view, this institution seems to have an important role to play in solving the Union’s democratic deficit. In this paper, I intend to analyze the evolution of the European Parliament and...

The constructivist approach first appeared in the field of international relations. Constructivism is accentuating the role of constitutive theories as fundamentally distinct from the causal theories and the general character of interpretation as a instrument of knowing the constitutive...

In the run up to the 2014 European Parliament elections, the new Spitzenkandidaten process and European-wide party campaigns fuelled expectations of strengthening democratic processes in Europe. At the same time, the anticipated surge of support for anti-establishment and Eurosceptic parties...

Most current debate about the democratic deficit equates democracy with party government and popular direction of policy (popular sovereignty). Alternative conceptions of democracy, pluralist or veto-group liberalism, are more consistent with European political and social circumstances and with...

This article compares national parliamentary scrutiny over European Union matters in two countries with coalition governments, Germany and the Netherlands, based on interviews with members of parliament serving on their European Affairs Committee. While acknowledging that legal powers and...

This paper compares legislative dynamics under all procedures in which the Council of Ministers votes by qualified majority (QMV). We make five major points. First, the EU governments have sought to reduce the democratic deficit by increasing the powers of the European Parliament since 1987,...

This article asks two questions: first, why are party voters less favourable towards specific EU policies than party elites?; second, how does political representation of EU preferences actually work, is it an elite- or a mass-driven process? The data-sets of the European Election Studies 1979...

Academic observers have long criticized the European Union for being plagued with a `democratic deficit', a critique that is based on the European parliamentary model of democracy. Although widely considered to be a valid foundation for democratic evaluation of the Union, the parliamentary model...

This article examines the initiatives of European Union in the field of the democracy promotion from a historical and political perspective. The analysis covers: the theoretical framework; the EU democracy promotion strategies in post-communist countries; the debates over the liberal reforms and...

The discussion on the relation of the European identity and the legitimacy of the European Union, including the questions of formation of the “Union” demos, or the influence of constructing EU´s citizenship on the legitimization of the European integrating process has already become a...