The (re)configuration of political representation in the EU

After the normative, participative and deliberative turns in political theory and empirical EU studies, we are currently witnessing the beginning of a “representative turn”, not least due to the much debated alleged democratic deficit in and of the EU. The proposed workshop understands itself as a stock-taking exercise of this “representative turn” and, at the same time, as a venue to charting new research needs on political and democratic representation in the European Union. We assume that representation is a sine qua non for the legitimacy of any democratic political system, the EU included. The workshop therefore focuses on the question: what is the relation between representation and democracy in the EU? Although the EU conceives of itself as a representative democracy in the Lisbon Treaty, the meaning of this concept for a supranational polity in both theoretical and practical terms is far from clear. On the contrary, the contemporary, historically contingent link between representation and democracy is severely challenged by various processes of diversification at all levels of political action (national, regional, global). Additional actors beyond parliaments claim representative functions and interact in new spaces of politics across different geographical levels, addressing formerly purely national issues and acquire new competences to act in additional spaces (internet, local juries, etc.). Consequently, it becomes increasingly unclear who is represented by whom in which forum. These processes challenge our understanding of representative democracy as electoral democracy within clearly delineated nation-states, provoking a situation in which “new frontiers” of representation develop.