Representation through deliberation-The European case

Eriksen, Erik O. and Fossum, John Erik (2011) Representation through deliberation-The European case. [Conference Proceedings] (Submitted)

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Abstract

This article shows that the main pattern of European democratization has unfolded along the lines of an EU organized as a multilevel system of representative parliamentary government and not as a system of deliberative governance as the transnationalists propound. But the multilevel EU has developed a structure of representation that is theoretically challenging. In order to come to grips with this we present an institutional variant of deliberative theory, which understands democracy as the combination of a principle of justification and an organizational form. It comes with the following explanatory mechanisms: claimsmaking, justification and learning which in the EU also program institutional copying and emulation mechanisms. We show that the EU has established an incomplete system of representative democracy steeped in a distinct representation-deliberation interface, which has emerged through a particular and distinct configuration of democratization mechanisms.

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