With the White Paper on European Governance (2001) the European Commission has introduced a new approach to European policy-making and civil society making public consultations an essential tool for improving governance and policy outputs. The present study seeks to explore the role of online...

The emergence of a transnational public sphere in Europe is expected to facilitate democratic control and public debate about European issues as well as enable the formation of a European collective identity. Taking this claim seriously, though, reveals that empirical research has so far taken a...

After briefly considering the problems of political authority and democratic reform typical of formal transnational institutions, this paper offers a theory of democratization for transnational polities. Democratizing a polity such as the European Union requires two conditions to be realized...

Political science literature often claims that the participation of civil society organisations increases the democratic quality of policy-making in international governance arrangements. However, it remains unclear under what conditions such a democratic value can be achieved and how the...

The EU constitutional process has ascribed a new role to civil society not only as a partner in governance but also as a constituent of the emerging EU polity. Civil society appears in this process primarily as the structure of voice that is articulated in relation to EU governance and that...

This paper argues that indicators of democratic performance should in the first instance be selected for their normative defensibility, rather than their empirical measurability. Yet democratic theory is a hard task-master in setting conditions for the normative derivation of indicators. It at...