Never has sovereignty been as fashionable as since its explanatory and normative force first came into doubt and its knell was tolled in the European Union. With the shift in authority away from the state to new sub-state, supra-state, post-state and non-state entities, an important question is...

This paper is essentially a translation of a comment in German (Joerges 2000) on a series of articles in which Rainer Schmalz-Bruns (1998, 1999a, 1999b) developed a concept of legitimate governance beyond the constitutional state, which he called deliberative supra-nationalism and contrasted...

Trust in political institutions is one of the key elements which make representative democracies work. Trust creates a connection between citizens and representative political institutions. Democratic governments which enjoy a large degree of trust also tend to have higher degrees of legitimacy...

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...

In this paper we suggest a research agenda beyond the legitimation strategies of the CIDEL project (i.e. legitimation through outcomes, values and rights). The European Union has developed beyond that of international organisation and derivative democratic construct. But the step from negative...

Hardly anywhere is the trend towards a perfection of transnational governance arrangements and their legalization more visible than in international trade. Governance arrangements established through and alongside WTO law are both practically important and theoretically challenging. They do not...

Europeanisation and globalisation are frequently held to undermine national democracy. What are then the prospects for democracy in the multi-level constellation that makes up the contemporary European political order? The European debate has taken the question of democracy beyond the nation...

In this paper we critically reassess the standard account of political representation, in order to question the mythical foundation of its premises and explain why it can no longer serve as an adequate explanatory framework in the modern political context. We argue that representation was not...