This paper seeks to shed light on a notion that is often considered essential in conferring global regulatory authority, but is rarely defined in contemporary scholarship on global governance: the notion of legitimacy. The authors center their analysis on the value of democracy as one of the...

The European Monetary Union (EMU) has removed crucial instruments of macroeconomic management from the control of democratically accountable governments. Worse yet, it has been the systemic cause of destabilizing macroeconomic imbalances that member states found difficult or impossible to...

The role of national parliaments in the EU has been at the centre of a long debate. Since the Maastricht treaty, new powers to the EU level have been accompanied not only by an increasing role of the European Parliament (EP) in the legislative process, but also by a number of declarations and...

In December 2005, the British Conservative Party elected a new leader, David Cameron. As Cameron's leadership comes increasingly under the spotlight, he may be required to justify unpopular decisions and policy directions without necessarily being able to demonstrate the ultimate prospect of...

In January 2016, the Canadian infrastructure company TransCanada Corporation filed a notice of intent to sue the United States government in a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Chapter 11 arbitration over the Keystone XL pipeline. At the center of this dispute is the State Department's...

Governments increasingly are seeking to use bilateral and regional trade agreements to reduce the cost-increasing effects of differences in product market regulation. They also pursue regulatory cooperation independent of trade agreements. It is important to understand what is being done through...

This paper applies to democracy Max Weber's classic theory of the instrumental legitimation of authority. It develops a model that takes into account the stimulus of institutional context and the influence on responses of individual perceptions of institutions, the experience of contacting...

The UK constitution is either theorised as a political constitution that is premised on the Westminster model of government or as a legal constitution that rests on moral principles, which the common law is said to protect. Both models conceive of democracy in procedural terms, and not in...

This contribution addresses the input legitimacy of the British EU membership referendum of June 2016. It considers who was given a vote in the first place, and whether those given a vote could make a reasonable choice in light of the campaign. More precisely, it assesses the following four...

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), once hailed as a visionary free-trade project, threatens to disintegrate over massive failures of public diplomacy and a sudden surge of popular resistance against private investment arbitration, at least in the form of Investor-State...