About the book
This book seeks to answer the question 'Which institutional architecture for which kind of democracy for the EU?' by bringing two important recent debates together: the institutional analysis of the Union and its democratic assessment. The book examines a series of institutional architectures in light of the democratic quality of the processes and decisions generated by them.
The discussion of these various institutional architectures is preceded by an analysis of the democratic values and principles according to which institutional architectures and governance structures should be assessed. The first part of the volume starts from key democratic principles and indicates which institutional architectures are most likely to embody them. The second part is dedicated to those institutional architectures that best describe the current state of the European Union and its likely future development, particularly given the impact of the current economic crisis. The fundamental belief that animates this volume is that it is only by paying attention to the democratic legitimacy of the Union that the process of European integration may hope to be sustainable, particularly in the face of the difficult economic crisis that the members of the Euro-area and the Union in general are experiencing.
Which Democratic Principles for the EU?
John Erik Fossum and Johannes Pollak in chapter 2 discuss the role and salience of the six main principles of delegation, accountability, representation, transparency, responsiveness, and participation in the EU context. They identify and discuss three focal points of the academic debate on democracy, considering also how the euro crisis is understood, and discuss how the six democratic principles figure within each of these. In rendering explicit how core analysts under each focal point have depicted the democratic implications of the euro crisis, the aim is to get a better sense of how the crisis has affected the terms of the EU democracy debate.
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Which Democratic Principles for the EU? What Deficit?
John Erik Fossum and Johannes Pollak
The European Union: Democratic Principles and Institutional Architectures in Times of Crisis
Simona Piattoni (ed.)
Oxford University Press, 2015
ISBN: 9780198716273