The Representative Dimension of the EU

According to the Lisbon Treaty, the EU is founded on representative democracy. Yet the very process of European integration has led to a ‘relocation of politics’ (Marc Bovens) to new, transnational or supranational, arenas of decision-making and the involvement of new actors, who lack core features of representative democracy: formal electoral authorisation as well as electoral accountability. In addition, both the EU and member states are experiencing a decreasing legitimacy with regard to the input-side of democratic representation due to lower turnout in elections, diminishing party identification, and, at the same time, an increase in demands for group recognition undermining the representational link between political institutions and the citizens. These developments not only challenge the democratic legitimacy of the EU (and its member states), but also standard theories of democratic political representation that focus on the role of regular territorially based elections as a mechanism for citizens to select their officials and entrust them with the running of public affairs. It is increasingly difficult to understand political representation merely as the proper translation of votes into seats, and to base it on the premise that that all other forms of representation and public decision-making in a polity can be subject to the ultimate decision or control of a parliament elected from across the territorial unit as a whole. We therefore invite individual papers and panels that deal with these and other challenges to representative democracy broadly defined in the EU. We actively encourage submissions that address these topics from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.