Christopher Lord

Legitimizing the EU: Is there a 'Post-parliamentary Basis' for its Legitimation?

This article argues that its character as a non‐state political system makes little difference to how the EU ought to be legitimated. Minimum requirements for the legitimation of the liberal democratic state (performance, democracy and identity) also hold for the legitimation of Union power, both normatively and sociologically. This constrains the application of innovative legitimation strategies to the Union, requiring that post‐parliamentary solutions be recast as complements, rather than substitutes, for a system of representative politics in the European arena, if the EU is to meet the core standard of democratic rule, which we take to be public control with political equality.

The EU's many representative modes: Colliding? Cohering?

At first glance the European Unions (EUs) compound form of representation allows a wide-ranging spectrum of actors to claim to be representative, and allows different channels to feed their demands and interests into the political system. While this may be understood as a redeeming feature of supranational politics, this article sounds a note of caution. The historically developed system of representation comprising different principles and practices may combine in ways that undermine standards by which claims to political representation can be justified. First, it is demonstrated that the urge to combine multiple channels of representation has its roots in the history and theory of representation itself. Second, we show the development of the EUs compound form of representation. Third, tests of how well principles and practices of representation combine in the European arena are proposed. It is shown that the EUs specific combination of representative practices hardly allows for ensuring public control with political equality.

Assessing Democracy in a Contested Polity

After reviewing difficulties with the literature on the democratic deficit, this article concludes that a method is needed for assessing democracy in a political system where there is fundamental agreement on what would constitute adequately democratic institutions. It then goes on to explore two suggestions for such a method: the development of well‐specified indicators of democratic performance for contrasting ideal‐types of Euro‐democracy; and the attribution of self‐ and peer assessments to institutional actors with competing perspectives on democratic standards in the EU.

The politics of justification? Applying the ‘Discourse Quality Index’ to the study of the European Parliament

In this paper, we apply a revised version of the discourse quality index (DQI) developed by Steenbergen et al. on European Parliament debates in an attempt to evaluate the democratic quality of representation at the EU level. This updated measurement instrument, after the inclusion of new indicators, helps us identify not just the principles of EU deliberation but most importantly the favourable contextual conditions of supranational deliberation. We illustrate the new DQI coding for selected debates over the last EU parliamentary term and across six debate topics following the former three pillar structure of the Union. We discuss how these data can be employed to assess the overall quality of deliberation in the European Parliament. At the same time we demonstrate that institutional issues matter for the quality of EP discourse much like MEPs personal characteristics. Issue attributes on the other hand, influence supranational deliberation but not in the expected direction.

The political theory and practice of parliamentary participation in the Common Security and Defence Policy

This contribution develops normative arguments for the democratic and parliamentary control of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). However, on the Kantian assumption that ‘ought implies can’, it also tries to make a case for parliamentary control in the face of scepticism about parliamentary politics in general, the capacities of the European Parliament (EP) and national parliaments to exercise satisfactory levels of public control over Union decisions, and the participation of parliaments in security decisions.

The democratic legitimacy of codecision

This contribution develops a framework for evaluating the legitimacy of codecision. It uses democratic theory to clarify the role of legislative procedures in securing the legitimacy of political systems. It shows how that role requires public control with political equality and public justification. It uses that standard to show how legislative agenda-setting, Council voting weights, European Parliament elections and seat apportionments, national parliamentary scrutiny, justificatory practices, and control of judicial and administrative rule-making all affect the legitimacy of codecision. Overall the contribution concludes that the legitimacy of codecision is part of a predicament that can only be managed, not solved.

Representation and Accountability: Communicating Tubes?

Although representation and accountability require one another in modern democracy, there are many possible tensions between them. Democratic theories tend to combine the two but in ways that are not always obvious, and, depending on the institutional properties of a political system, varied ways of combining representation with accountability can amount to significant differences in the practice and quality of democracy. The authors review those effects through the lens of the British and American traditions of representative government, and they also make their own attempt to bring greater conceptual order to an understanding of the relationship between representation and accountability in democratic politics. They show how representation and accountability are ‘unsaturated’ concepts, whose relationship one to another can only be properly understood through several further stages of specification. These must at least include specification of what kind of representation is thought desirable, of the major choices that need to be made in the design of any democratic polity, and of social and international contexts. The last point is of special relevance to the transposition of representation–accountability relationships to the EU.

What Role for Parties in Eu Politics

The argument of this article is that the EU occupies an under-conceptualised middle ground between a partyless political system and one that has parties of its own. It distinguishes those attributes of party politics that have developed in the European arena from those that have not. It then develops three alternative explanations for such a pattern of uneven development.

Differentiated integration in the European Union: a concept, a process, a system or a theory?

ABSTRACT Differentiation has been a feature of European integration for more than two decades. Nowadays, more than half of European Union (EU) policies are now implemented in different ways. Recent debates over a potential British exit from the EU revived discussions on the future of European integration, offering a potential case for disintegration. Yet scholars and practitioners still find it difficult to define the notion. The introduction to this collection offers a survey of the literature on differentiated integration, its most recent developments and justifies why the study of differentiation needs to move up the research agenda of European integration. It suggests that studying differentiated integration as a concept, a process, a system and a theory is the minimum needed to understand it. Finally, it demonstrates the necessity to study differentiation as a permanent and ‘normal’ feature of European integration.

The European Parliament and the legitimation of agencification

The European Parliament (EP) has often criticized the agencification of the European Union. Yet in practice it often uses its legislative powers to strengthen the powers and independence of European agencies. To explain this paradox, this paper analyses the six cases where the 2004–2009 EP legislated to create a new European agency. It argues that the Parliament overcame some of its doubts about agencification by proposing amendments which brought the legislation closer to its own legitimation beliefs. Moreover, the EP has developed a substantial repertoire of amendments which it now more or less repeats every time it is confronted with a proposal for a new agency. Many of these amendments are designed to shore up control of agencies, sometimes in novel ways which suggest that the Parliament has in part made its peace with agencification by becoming more amenable to the control of agencies by methods involving multiple principals.