The scarce literature on the European Economic and Social Committee has mostly paid attention to its institutional position and any influence it may have. Contrary to such an output approach this article focuses on the input of the ESC, i.e. its representative role. It argues that the ESC was...

In a series of recent papers, Giandomenico Majone and Andrew Moravcsik have ‘raised the bar’ in the debate over the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ in the European Union. These two influential scholars both contend that much of the existing analysis is flawed and that the EU is as...

Although we still celebrate the late twentieth-century ‘victory of democracy’, our understanding of what democracy entails in both theory and practice is increasingly subject to a variety of qualifying definitions, many of which now seem to devalue the role of elections and electoral...

In recent years, not only governance, but also civil society has been a veritable growth industry both in politics and academia. Depending on the author, organised civil society was associated with expectations of increasing input or output legitimacy. With regard to the EU, participation of...

This paper argues that current widespread characterizations of EU governance as multi-level and networked overlook the emergent architecture of the Union’s public rule making. In this architecture, framework goals (such as full employment, social inclusion, “good water status”, a unified...

It has been argued that the European Union suffers from serious accountability deficits. But how can we establish the existence of accountability deficits? This paper tries to get to grips with the appealing but elusive concept of accountability by asking three types of questions, thus providing...

This paper examines the normative, empirical, and constitutional debates surrounding the use of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in European social policy. The OMC is an experimentalist approach to European Union governance, based on benchmarking national progress towards European...

Democracies in Europe differ in what they see as being at the core of the democratic system. In some countries, citizen participation constitutes the fundamental tenet of democracy; in others, democracy is closely linked to pluralism and the protection of minorities. This paper tries to identify...