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Qui sont et que font les acteurs de la représentation d'intérêts travaillant à Bruxelles? Avec environ 12 000 organisations inscrites au registre européen de transparence et des budgets croissants, le lobbying constitue une réalité concrète et tangible du fonctionnement de l'Union européenne. On sait pourtant très peu de choses sur celles et ceux qui exercent cette activité. Cet ouvrage collectif entend combler ce manque et éclairer les transformations récentes du paysage européen de la représentation des intérêts. En examinant les pratiques et les trajectoires sociales des lobbyistes évoluant à Bruxelles, les recherches empiriques rassemblées ici lèvent le voile sur un univers souvent fantasmé. Croisant données qualitatives et quantitatives, elles explorent des structures et des secteurs d'activité variés : très grandes entreprises, fédérations européennes, cabinets d'affaires publiques, ONG, syndicats, intervenant sur la régulation financière, les secteur portuaire et pharmaceutique, les politiques sociales, du marché commun ou encore de concurrence. À travers le portrait sociologique des lobbyistes, cet ouvrage met en lumière leurs relations d'interdépendance avec les acteurs politiques et institutionnels et leur rôle dans la fabrique de l'action publique européenne.

Representative democracy remains the best available form of government – and the one preferred by most EU citizens, but satisfaction with how it plays out varies greatly across the continent. Among the perceived weaknesses are high levels of political corruption, low resilience to disinformation, and out-of-touch governing elites. Yet there is some hope that direct channels for citizens to express their concerns and preferences, fact-based deliberation in representative bodies and robust mechanisms to hold governments to account can help save European democracy from the onslaught of populism. This volume draws together proposals into a framework reflecting the four cumulative criteria used by modern political theorists to assess the health of a democracy: inclusion, choice, deliberation and impact. Its expert contributors offer pragmatic ideas to strengthen representative democracy at both the national and EU level.

Um den aktuellen „Krisen“ Europas in einer konstruktiven Art und Weise begegnen zu können, widmet sich Lena Wach dem europäischen Citoyen. Dieser wird sowohl als normative Figur profiliert, als auch in seiner empirischen Bedeutungsvielfalt erfasst. Mit Blick auf die „Krisen“ stimmen die identifizierten Ansätze kollektiver europäischer Identitätsbildung hoffnungsvoll. Gleichzeitig wird deutlich, dass es einer Förderung des Wissens um und des Ausbaus an Partizipationsmöglichkeiten auf europäischer Ebene bedarf.

Im Zentrum dieses Buches steht die Zu- und Abnahme der Demokratiequalität in den EU-Staaten. Mithilfe des Demokratie Barometers wird für die Jahre 2004 bis 2012 nachgezeichnet, dass ein Decline of Democracy keineswegs auf prominente Beispiele wie Polen und Ungarn begrenzt ist. Vielmehr identifiziert Theresia Smolka ein Bündel struktureller Faktoren, die EU-weit gültig sind. Vor allem eine niedrige Einkommensungleichheit und lange EU-Mitgliedschaft wirken sich negativ auf die Demokratiequalität der EU-Mitglieder aus.

Welche Bedeutung hat die Verfassung für den demokratischen Staat? Was sollen wir über die Vefassung wissen. Kommentare zum Grundgesetz erläutern einzelne Paragraphen, doch wie steht es um die fachdidaktische Auseinandersetzung zum Thema Verfassungswissen? Die Festschrift zu Joachim Detjens 65. Geburtstag sammelt diverse Stimmen aus Fachdidaktik und Fachwissenschaft um sich und bilanziert den Anspruch an ein Kanonwissen.

Democracies evolve. Their evolution is not only key to their survival; it is also a reflection of the changing environment in which they operate. This book contributes to the analysis and understanding of how democratic states have transformed over time by examining a number of challenges and opportunities that they face. With a focus on ‘Europe 31', understood as the EU28 plus Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland, the book brings together separate strands of literature which often remain disconnected in political science narratives. Looking at citizen–state relations, the restructuring of politics and institutions of the state, and developments which reach'beyond and below'the state, it interrogates a variety of issues ranging from the decline of parties or the re-emergence of nationalism as a political force, to liberal challenges to social democracy, terrorist threats, and climate change. The book combines these different dimensions into a comprehensive overview of the state of contemporary democracy, its challenges and opportunities, and its dynamic capacity to adapt. In other words, it deals with the perpetual threats to and transformations of democracy, and the state's ability to protect and strengthen its democratic attributes.This text will be of key interest to scholars of European Politics, Comparative Politics, and Democracy Studies.

In 2015, the European Union is not going well. But does this mean that Europe is not going well? More and more citizens of the European States make it very clear that they have another opinion about political participation as just to confer to the leaders of political parties a procedural legitimacy. Considering the epochal challenges (e.g. the migration from Africa) and the simultaneously increasing credibility deficit, the political establishment becomes ever more alienated from the citizens when staging „Europe Events“, without taking the European Civil Societies seriously as political partners. The present contributions have the intention to examine the situation of national Civil Societies in Europe and if one can speak of a comprehensive European Civil Society. Im Jahr 2015 geht es der Europäischen Union schlecht. Aber geht es deshalb Europa schlecht? Die Bürger der europäischen Staaten machen zunehmend deutlich, dass sie ihre politische Mitwirkung anders verstehen, als dem Führungspersonal der Parteien eine prozedurale Legitimität zu verleihen. Angesichts epochaler Herausforderungen (z.B. die Migration aus Afrika) bei einem gleichzeitig wachsenden Glaubwürdigkeitsdefizit entfremdet es die politische Ebene noch mehr von den Bürgern, wenn „Europa-Events“ inszeniert werden, ohne die Bürgergesellschaften politisch ernst zu nehmen. Die vorliegenden Beiträge haben das Ziel zu prüfen, wie es um die nationalen Bürgergesellschaften Europas bestellt ist und ob von einer übergreifenden europäischen Bürgergesellschaft gesprochen werden kann.

Democracies are transforming worldwide, but at the same time political inequality is increasing. This development threatens to leave growing portions of mass publics effectively ‘outside'the political process.This volume brings together leading authorities in the field of democratic citizenship and participation to address pertinent questions concerning the quality of the democratic political process at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Analysing causes and consequences of recent developments in democratic governance and citizenship, it contributes new and original research to the ongoing debate on the crisis of representative democracy. The contributors deal with a broad range of issues including aspects of democratic citizenship and citizens'perceptions of system performance, political inequality and the democratic impact of participatory innovations. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in democratization studies, democratic citizenship, comparative politics, political sociology and political participation.

Können nationale Europadiskurse europäische Identität erzeugen und damit zur Demokratisierung der EU beitragen? Aufbauend auf einer ausführlichen vergleichenden Untersuchung nationaler Europadiskurse sowie der politischen Systeme und Kulturen Deutschlands und Frankreichs liefert der Band zahlreiche Ergebnisse sowie weiterführende Hypothesen und Modelle zu dieser Frage.Im ersten Teil werden die Rolle europäischer Identität für die Demokratisierung der EU und verschiedene Theorien zu europäischer Identität diskutiert; darauf aufbauend wird das vergleichende diskursanalytische Untersuchungsdesign entwickelt.Den Kern der Arbeit bildet dann die vergleichende Untersuchung a) der Diskurse zur Ratifizierung des EU-Verfassungsvertrages, die in beiden Staaten im Frühjahr 2005 stattfand, und b) ihrer jeweiligen nationalen Kontexte, nämlich der politischen Systeme, politischen Parteien, Einstellungen der Bürger, nationalen Identitätskonzepte und vorherigen Europadiskurse.

This book provides a critical analysis of the European Union's approach to ‘governance', focusing on the way in which civil society is incorporated within the EU decision-making process and arguing that it is not conducive to the democratisation of EU governance. Using a governmentality approach, Kutay demonstrates that civic actors are not incorporated into EU decision-making processes as they are; rather, they are formed, manipulated and guided by political programming. The author explains how this acts to prescribe and construct particular types of subjectivities, thereby limiting and constraining the types of participation that might emerge as part of European civil society and the process of political participation.Governance and European Civil Society will be of interest to students and scholars of European Union politics, global governance, civil society and democracy, Central and East European studies and political and international theory.

Angela Liberatore Governance shifted from a concept used by a few specialists to one quite widely (while surely not universally) used in policy making circles and pub­ lic debate. This does not mean that the interpretation of the concept is in the meantime uncontested or obvious. Analytical and policy debate is at times quite heated on whether'governance'means'privatisation of government'or rather involvement of various actors at various levels in policy making without'dismantling'the role of public authorities. Therefore, a better un­ derstanding is needed of what'governance'actually means, why and how governance arrangements and actors in Europe are changing, and what are the implications of such changes -for instance in terms of democracy and le­ gitimacy. Such understanding is especially needed in the specific context of the challenges to European policy making and institutions posed by the struc­ tural changes in the European society and economy, the ongoing enlargement of the European Union, and the new global context. The analytical and policy need to better understand governance is ac­ knowledged and taken care of in a number of national and international re­ search initiatives, and is part of a collective European endeavour. Research on'governance and citizenship'started being undertaken in European Community research programmes within the Key Action'Improving the socio-economic knowledge base'of the 5'h Framework Research Programme and will be further supported in the 6'h Framework Programme, under the priority on'Citizens and governance in the knowledge-based society'.

How can the European Union engage and connect with the people it aims to represent? What initiatives and schemes have been used to engage EU citizens? To what extent can such procedures be considered a move forward towards a more participative and democratic Europe? This collection of internationally recognised specialists in European integration and innovative democratic practices seek to answer these key questions, explore European citizens'thoughts and opinions about the EU and evaluate the governing elite's attempts to engage with the public. It offers critical analysis of EU justifications and strategies for implementing Deliberative Citizens Involvement Projects and focuses on some of the major participative experiences trialled and implemented by EU institutions. By comparing these different attempts to increase and bolster the participation of EU citizens and evaluating their impact the book offers valuable and original material on the civic involvement of EU citizens and the legitimacy of the EU decision making process.

For the European Union of the 21st century, the search for sustainable prosperity and stability includes the challenge of reconciling democratic ideals and practices with the construction of a European constitutional order. From the 2001 Laeken Summit to the 2009 Lisbon Treaty and beyond EU leaders have repeatedly set out to bring citizens closer to EU governance by making it more democratic and effective yet several national ratification referendums have shown that publics are divided about whether and why to endorse or veto complex EU reform packages imposed from the top down. Despite these limitations people do effectively engage in the making of a European polity. By initiating national court proceedings active citizens are promoting fundamental European rights in Member States'practices. As party members they contribute to shaping mass media communication about, and national publics'understanding of, European political alternatives. As civil society activists citizens help build social networks for contesting certain EU reforms or advocating others. Last but not least, as voters in national and European elections they choose between competing party visions, and national parliamentary stances regarding the role of democratic citizenship. This original contribution to the debate about democratic citizenship vis-à-vis the challenges of economic globalization and European political integration presents critical explorations of different fields of direct, representative, participatory and deliberative democratic citizenship practices that affect the transformation of Europe.

Die Entwicklung einer europäischen Bürgerschaft, einer europäischen Öffentlichkeit und der Demokratie in der Europäischen Union sind Voraussetzung für Integration und Legitimation der sich erweiternden Europäischen Union. Die Beiträge analysieren den Entwicklungsstand von Demokratie und Bürgerbeteiligung, der europäischen Öffentlichkeit und der europäischen Integration im Spannungsfeld von EU, Nationen und Regionen.

An exploration and analysis of the regulation and practices of citizens'initiatives in eleven European democracies and the EU. The contributors to this volume shed light on how citizens'initiatives influence patterns of political agenda-setting in representative democracies and how they can contribute to participatory democracy.

Drawing on rich ethnographic work in both Eastern and Western Europe, The New Environmentalism? presents a range of case studies to explore the impact of corruption in EU-funded structural development projects. With detailed analyses of the forms and contexts of environmentalism, the book reveals the manner in which corruption is generated by the planning and implementation procedures of the projects, demonstrating in each case that environmental movements emerge as by-products of these processes, using corruption as part of a discourse employed in support of their action against political (regional and state) institutions, as well as to communicate their goals to local citizens. Shedding light on the ways in which revelations about corruption are adopted as a means to fostering civic participation in environmental movements and influencing institutional trust, this book contributes to our understanding of the loss of legitimacy and trust in local and global political institutions. Comparative in approach, The New Environmentalism? provides new insights into the emergence of strong civic movements at local and trans-local levels, in resistance to citizens'sense of increasing alienation from political participation and decision making. As such, it will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists concerned with questions of legitimacy, corruption and activism.

Is the ‘golden age'of democracy really over due to the pressures of globalisation and the erosion of the nation state? Within this book, Heinelt seeks to address the democratic deficit in political systems linked to limited Citizen Participation reflecting on the notion of democracy and participatory governance and how they relate to each other. Exploring democracy beyond the governmental structures and focusing on participatory governance in particular this book demonstrates that common notions of democracy have to be re-conceptualised without neglecting its key ideas. By arguing that it is a political task to turn the inevitability of governance into a participatory form, Heinelt develops a model of different ‘worlds of democratic actions'which shows that democratic political systems have to be considered as a complex and broad web of various forms of interest articulation and intermediation as well as decision-making. Making an important contribution to the ‘third transformation of democracy', this book will be of interest to students and scholars of governance, democracy, policymaking & European studies.

The past 15 years have seen declining public support for European integration, and widespread suggestions that a legitimacy crisis faces the European Union (EU). Many in the EU have believed that this problem could be effectively tackled by vesting greater powers in the European Parliament (EP), the Union's only directly-elected institution. The central argument of this book is that, while considerable efforts have been made to increase the status of the EP, it is in crucial respects a failure as a representative body. This failure is grounded in the manner in which the parliament is elected. The electoral systems used for EP elections in many EU countries are, we argue, actively obstructive of Europe's voters being represented in the way that they are most likely to respond positively towards. While the behaviour of EP members is shaped strongly by the electoral systems under which they are elected (which vary across the 25 member-states of the EU), the electoral systems currently in place push most of them to behave in ways contrary to what citizens desire. Drawing on public opinion data, surveys of MEPs and considerable qualitative interview evidence, we show that the failure of parliamentary representation in the EU has a strong foundation in electoral institutions.

The European Union is frequently accused of having a'democratic deficit'. Many commentators argue that this could be remedied by increasing the powers of the European Parliament relative to those of the Council and the Commission. The fact that the European Parliament is the only EU institution whose members are directly elected leads to the assumption that it is also the most legitimate. The author argues that this position is based on the flawed assumption that the nature of the European citizenry is similar to those of the member states. In other words, the position assumes that the union has a demos, or a people, who are prepared to accept majority outcomes even when finding themselves in the minority. In this book the author argues that this is not the case and that the most severe dimension of the democracy problem is not procedural, but socio-psychological. The fact that the EU does not have a people means that establishing an EU-wide democracy based on analogies to domestic political systems is likely to lead to a further loss of democratic legitimacy. The EU can rely on output legitimacy in policy areas which do not require pan-European solidarity and identity and in which policy-making at EU-level increases efficiency and thereby benefits all citizens. However, policy areas which require high levels of solidarity or a common identity should either remain fully within the nation states, or be subject to intergovernmental rather than supranational decision-making at EU-level.

This is a study in EU legitimacy from the perspective of EU citizens. Mather argues that legitimacy is empirical:'legitimacy only exists if people feel that it does'and that the EU is a unique and dynamic institution, hence legitimating factors are also evolutionary.

This book provides a systematic comparative analysis of how and why voting behaviour has changed in Europe in recent decades. It has been widely argued that radical changes have occurred in the how and why of voting behaviour in Europe as a result of changes in the structure of society, most notably the rise in material affluence and educational attainment, and the decline in religious observance and the size of the working class. But most tests of this proposition have been undertaken on single countries. This book, however, systematically tests the validity of this proposition across various European countries. The argument that social change has altered voting behaviour has been increasingly challenged on the grounds that it takes too little account of changes in the choices that are put before voters by the parties, such as the promises and proposals that are put forward at election time. This book, therefore, also assesses the relative explanatory power of claims that voting behaviour has changed because of changes in society against claims that it responds to changes in the offerings of political parties. And it is clear from the analyses reported in this book that contrary to the claims of much of the extant literature, the latter argument appears better able to account for many of the patterns and changes in European voting behaviour, and thus the book constitutes an important challenge to much current academic orthodoxy. This is the first book to provide a systematic comparison of the long-term dynamics of the voting behaviour of individual voters across such a wide range of European countries, taking into account the dynamics of the choices put before voters by the parties and, for the first time, relating this to the way voters behave. Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. The General Editors are Max Kaase, Professor of Political Science, Vice President and Dean, School of Humanities and Social Science, International University Bremen; and Kenneth Newton, Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Southampton. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.

Alors que certains célébraient la plus importante consultation électorale transnationale jamais organisée en juin 2004, d'autres insistaient sur la montée inexorable de l'abstention. De vraies questions de fond sont objets de débat et portent sur le modèle de légitimité et de représentation politique sur lequel repose l'Union européenne. Le présent ouvrage est consacré à l'analyse des résultats des élections européennes de 2004, il met aussi en perspective le débat sur l'avenir de l'Union.

A l'heure où la construction communautaire vient de franchir une nouvelle étape, avec l'élargissement à dix nouveaux pays, il est urgent de rappeler que le succès de l'Union européenne ne se réduit pas à l'économie, au droit ou à son extension géographique. Heureusement, il existe aussi des lieux concrets où des Européens échangent des idées, des pratiques, des opinions politiques aux sens large. On peut se poser la question, car ces bribes d'espaces publics restent encore précaires et les obstacles sont nombreux. Ce livre se veut un début de cartographie de ces espaces publics en Europe;