How novel, how stable, how coherent and how democratic are the European Union’s representative institutions?
Many arguments can be made for desiring a compound form of representation at the Union level, such as the sheer social complexity of the Union, the pluralism of political values affected by its decisions, and the importance of avoiding excessive concentrations of power in single institutions. Yet, desirable does not mean possible. Moreover, it cannot be assumed that combining different modes of representation will automatically add up to good representation. To the contrary, the lumping together of different approaches to representation may amount to little more than a fallacy of composition.