Download or read book Democratic Empowerment in the European Union written by David Levi-Faur and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2018 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at democratic empowerment via institutional designs that extend the political rights of European citizens. It focuses on three themes: first, the positive and negative effects of the European Union institutional design on the political rights of its citizens; second, challenges for democratic regimes across the world in the 21st century in the context of regionalism and globalization; third, the constraints of neoliberalism and capitalist markets on the ability of citizens to effectively achieve their political rights within the Union.
Download or read book Promoting Middle East Democracy written by Mona Yacoubian and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the end of the Cold War, European security concerns have focused increasingly on the potential for instability on Europe's southern flank. In 1995, the European Union developed a framework for cooperation with the southern Mediterranean nations. These efforts have included some relatively ineffective programs to promote democracy in the region. In the aftermath of 9/11, the goal of encouraging the development of Middle East democracy has acquired greater urgency, not least in the eyes of the United States, which has bolstered its own efforts to spur democratic reform.
Download or read book Democracy in the European Union written by Christopher Lord and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1998 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been much talk of the democratic deficit in the European Union, but little understanding of the problems of constructing a transnational democracy. This book seeks to remedy these defects by looking at democratic authorization, and representation of Union power.
Download or read book Social Democracy and the Challenge of European Union written by Robert Ladrech and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He also explores what this new form of political activity means for European politics, arguing that the traditional positions of left and right may be becoming increasingly significant within the EU's evolving, transnational political culture.
Download or read book European Democracy as Demoi cracy written by Francis Cheneval and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whereas ‘democracy’ assumes a single demos or people, ‘demoi-cracy’ refers to democratic government and governance in a polity constituted by separate peoples. Since the European Union consists of many demoi with different collective identities, largely separate public spheres, and a predominantly national political infrastructure, demoi-cracy is an appropriate standard for the analysis and evaluation of democracy in the EU. In its vertical dimension, demoi-cracy is based on the equality and interaction of citizens’ and statespeoples’ representatives in the making of common policies. Horizontally, it seeks to balance equal transnational rights of citizens with national policy-making autonomy. This volume offers exemplary studies exploring the potential for and the workings of demoi-cracy in the EU across a broad range of institutions and issues in both its vertical and horizontal dimensions. In particular, the contributions address the following questions: Is demoi-cracy relevant to citizen attitudes and public discourse on the EU’s legitimacy? How do national and supranational democratic institutions interact? Do the EU’s modes of governance, such as regulation through agencies, mutual recognition, and the open method of coordination, meet demoi-cratic expectations? This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.
Download or read book Direct Democracy in the EU written by Steven Blockmans and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The European Union is grappling with a democracy problem. The succession of crises which have plagued the increasingly executive EU for years, has led to a rising cacophony of voices calling for fundamental change to the integration project. Yet despite the seismic shock of the Brexit referendum and the electoral upsets by nativist parties across the continent, few of the plans for EU reform include concrete proposals to reduce the age-old democratic deficit. This book is concerned with the two-pronged question of how the relationship between citizens, the state and EU institutions has changed, and how direct democratic participation can be improved in a multi-layered Union. As such, this edited volume focuses not on populism per se, nor does it deeply engage with policy and output legitimacy. Rather, the research is concerned with process and polity. Building on the notion of increasing social, economic and political interdependence across borders, this volume asks how a sense of solidarity and European identity can be rescued from the bottom up by politically empowering citizens to ‘take back control’ of their EU.
Download or read book Democratisation against Democracy written by Andrea Teti and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains why the EU is not a ‘normative actor’ in the Southern Mediterranean, and how and why EU democracy promotion fails. Drawing on a combination of discourse analysis of EU policy documents and evidence from opinion polls showing ‘what the people want’, the book shows EU policy fails because the EU promotes a conception of democracy which people do not share. Likewise, the EU’s strategies for economic development are misconceived because they do not reflect the people’s preferences for greater social justice and reducing inequalities. This double failure highlights a paradox of EU democracy promotion: while nominally emancipatory, it de facto undermines the very transitions to democracy and inclusive development it aims to pursue.
Download or read book Democracy in Europe written by Vivien A. Schmidt and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006-10-19 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eagerly awaited volume, from a leading scholar on Europeanization, explores the impact of European integration on national democracies. Focusing on the case studies of France, Britain, Italy, and Germany, this is an exciting contribution to work on the implications of European integration for democratic government.
Download or read book Democracy in the European Union written by Alex Warleigh and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2003-04-21 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book comprehensively reviews one of the most salient, ongoing debates at the heart of the European Union (EU) today: democratic reform.
Download or read book Democracy in the European Union written by Erik Oddvar Eriksen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The European Union is widely held to suffer from a democratic deficit, and this raises a wider question: can democracy at all be applied to decision-making bodies beyond the nation state? Today, the EU is a highly complex entity undergoing profound changes. This book asks how the type of cooperation that the EU is based on can be explained; what are the integrative forces in the EU and how can integration at a supra-national level come about? The key thinkers represented in this volume stress that in order to understand integration beyond the nation state, we need new explanatory categories associated with deliberation because a supranational entity as the EU posesses far weaker and less well-developed means of coercion - bargaining resources - than do states. The most appropriate term to denote this is the notion of 'deliberative supranationalism'. This pioneering work, headed by major writers such as Habermas, Schlesinger and Bellamy, brings a new perspective to this key issue in contemporary politics and political theory.
Download or read book Democracy in the European Union written by Liana Giorgi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invaluable exploration of the concern that transfers of power to European Union institutions are producing a worrying new form of democratic deficit. While ongoing reforms of these institutions promise to render decision processes at European level more transparent and accountable, these expert authors examine whether there is a European public sphere for citizens and their representatives to discuss, deliberate and evaluate issues of public relevance. They show how the process of European integration has given rise to a new object of study – European society, and why key questions concerning identity, citizenship, democracy, government and institutions are being raised anew and are major political concerns at European and Member State level. With six case studies of EU policy-making and representative institutions, they analyze the intensity of participatory practices in four dimensions: mobilization of societal actors, public contestation and debate, openness of decision-making, and responsiveness of policy makers. This book will be of strong interest to students and researchers of the European Union, European politics, European studies as well as those concerned with more theoretical aspects of governance and the public sphere.
Download or read book Constraining Democratic Governance in Southern Europe written by José M. Magone and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking book, José M. Magone investigates the growing political, economic and social divisions between the core countries of the European Union and the southern European periphery. He examines the major hindrances that are preventing the four main southern European countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece) from keeping up with the increasing pace of European integration, and the effects that this is having on democratic governance.
Download or read book Subnational Democracy in the European Union written by John Loughlin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2001-04-05 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the result of a research project carried out for the Committee of the Regions and analyses the 'state of play' of democratic practice at the subnational level in all of the European Member states. Its initial hypothesis was that liberal democracy is closely associated with the rise of the nation state in the 19th century. The nation state, however, has been significantly changing under the impact of various forces including globalization and regionalization, internal reforms of the public administration system such as privatization and deregulation, and the emergence of regions and local authorities as actors in their own rights. these changes pose challenges for the practice of democracy and, in particular, for its expression at the regional and local level. The book deals with the theoretical implications of these changes in terms of the changing nature of the state and new regionalism. However, one of the key findings is that there is no one uniform meaning of democracy across member states and there are variations even within a single state depending on whether the national or subnational levels are considered. Each country chapter gives the historical and philosophical background to the concept of democracy in each country. There is also an exposition of the institutional expression of democracy at the different levels. With regard to the practice of democracy at the subnational level, the role of pressure groups and policy networks is examined as well as the role of political parties. There is a survey of critiques of subnational democracy. Finally, there is a survey of innovative approaches to improving regional and local democracy through a variety of mechanisms and reforms as ways of responding to the challenge and opportunities facing it today
Download or read book Democratic Governance and European Integration written by Ronald Holzhacker and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the power and scope of the European Union moves further, beyond traditional forms of international cooperation between sovereign states, it is important to analyse how these developments are impacting upon national institutions and processes of democratic representation and legitimacy in the member countries. The authors in this book identifyfour core processes of democratic governance present in any democratic political system that link societal and state processes of decision-making: opinion formation, interestintermediation, national executive decision-making and national parliamentary scrutiny. From a normative perspective they discuss what impacts this process of Europeanizationhas on democracy in the evolving system. They conclude that more changes are seen within the state-centric than in the societal-centred processes of democracy, thus thepublic seems to have been 'left behind? in the process of constructing Europe. The empirical research and normative discussion presented in this book are designed to further our knowledge concerning the Europeanization of social and state processes of democracy and to contribute to the continuing dialogue on democracy in the EuropeanUnion. This book will be of great interest to academics and researchers of political science, public policy and international relations, as well as those interested in European studies andcomparative politics.
Download or read book The Challenge of Democratic Representation in the European Union written by S. Kröger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does political representation in the European Union look like? This volume argues that the transformation of representation in the EU is characterized by diversification processes, albeit with an uncertain ability to re-configure the link between representation and democracy.
Download or read book Building Europe s Parliament written by Berthold Rittberger and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-03-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why have the national governments of EU member states successively endowed the European Parliament with supervisory, budgetary, and legislative powers over the past fifty years? Building Europe's Parliament sheds new light on this pivotal issue, and provides a major contribution to the study of the European Parliament. Rittberger develops a theory of delegation to representative institutions in international politics which combines elements of democratic theory and different strands of institutionalist theory. To test the plausibility of his theory, Rittberger draws on extensive archival material and offers theory-guided, in-depth case studies of three landmark decisions in the history of the European Parliament: the creation of the Common Assembly of the ECSC in 1951 and the concomitant acquisition of supervisory powers vis-à-vis the quasi-executive High Authority; the delegation of budgetary powers following the signing of the Treaty of Luxembourg in 1970; and the delegation of legislative powers resulting from the adoption of the Single European Act signed in 1986. This is followed by the charting of more recent key developments, culminating in the adoption of the Constitutional Treaty in 2004. The book provides a welcome addition to the literature on institutional design by reflecting on the conditions under which governments opt for the creation and empowerment of parliamentary institutions in international politics. It also makes a valuable contribution to the application of democratic theory to the study of the European Union by demonstrating that political elites shared the view that the new supranational polity which emerged from the debris of World War II suffered from 'democratic deficit' since its inception, thus disproving the claim that the lamented 'democratic deficit' is a recent phenomenon.
Download or read book The Politics of Inclusion and Empowerment written by J. Andersen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-04-20 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalization poses new challenges for the modern welfare state and democracies. One controversial issue is how struggles for economic equality are linked with struggles for recognition of difference according to gender, ethnicity and sexuality. The Politics of Inclusion and Empowerment examines the political and academic debates about the inclusion or exclusion of women and marginalized social groups from different policy contexts. The focus is on the different class and gender regimes influencing the interplay of political, civil and social citizenship at different levels of politics.
