IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cposxx/v36y2015i2p196-216.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

‘We the People’ versus ‘We the Heads of States’: the debate on the democratic deficit of the European Union

Author

Listed:
  • Henrik Bang
  • Mads Dagnis Jensen
  • Peter Nedergaard

Abstract

The Eurozone crisis has rekindled the debate on the democratic deficit of the European Union (EU). In this paper, the debate is reconsidered by contrasting the modus vivendi of ‘We the People’ in the USA with the modus vivendi of ‘We the Heads of States’ in the EU. It is demonstrated that many of the solutions to the alleged democratic deficit focus on how more voice can be given to ‘We the People’ on the input side, but that this goes against the functional logic of the EU system, thereby undermining its ability to govern. Instead, we argue that more attention should be given to how to increase output legitimacy, and a number of proposals are put forward. Such a reshuffling of the analytical focus is the best way forward to escape the current impasse in the debate on how to ‘fix’ democracy in the EU.

Suggested Citation

  • Henrik Bang & Mads Dagnis Jensen & Peter Nedergaard, 2015. "‘We the People’ versus ‘We the Heads of States’: the debate on the democratic deficit of the European Union," Policy Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(2), pages 196-216, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cposxx:v:36:y:2015:i:2:p:196-216
    DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2014.1000846
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01442872.2014.1000846
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01442872.2014.1000846?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Feng-Shang Wu & Hong-Ji Huang, 2024. "Why Do Some Countries Innovate Better than Others? A New Perspective of Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy Regimes and National Absorptive Capacity," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(7), pages 1-30, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cposxx:v:36:y:2015:i:2:p:196-216. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/cpos .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.