Can a directly elected European Parliament help deliver standards by which the European Union can be indirectly legitimated through its component national democracies? This article argues that the Union can be indirectly legitimate where it helps member state democracies meet their own obligations to their own publics. The Union can do just that by managing externalities in ways needed to secure core values of justice, democracy and freedom from arbitrary domination within member states. Yet that poses a predicament: for if any one member state has an interest in imposing negative externalities or in freeriding on positive externalities provided by another, then so may its voters and democratic institutions. The article argues a directly elected European Parliament can help manage that predicament both by identifying externalities and by ensuring their regulation meets standards of public control, political equality and justification owed to individual national democracies.

Some scholars and policy makers argue in favour of increasing democratic contestation for leadership and policy at the European level, for instance by having European‐wide parties campaign for competing candidates for President of the European Commission ahead of European Parliament elections. But do such changes put the survival of the European Union at risk? According to the consociational interpretation of the EU, the near absence of competitive and majoritarian elements has been a necessary condition for the stability of the EU political system given its highly diverse population. This article contributes to the debate in two ways. First, it develops a more precise understanding of ‘problematic’ diversity by examining how three variables – the heterogeneity, polarisation and crosscuttingness of citizen preferences over public polices – affect the risk of democratic contestation generating persistent and systematically dissatisfied minorities. Second, it uses opinion surveys to determine whether the degree of diversity of the European population is problematically high compared to that of established democratic states. It is found that the population of the EU is slightly more heterogeneous and polarised than the population of the average Member State, although policy preferences in several Member States are more heterogeneous and polarised than the EU as a whole. Strikingly, however, policy preference cleavages are more crosscutting in the EU than in nearly all Member States, reducing the risk of persistent minorities. Moreover, policy preferences tend to be less heterogeneous and polarised, and nearly as crosscutting, in the EU as a whole as in the United States. For observers worried about how high polarisation and low crosscuttingness in policy preferences may combine to threaten democratic stability, these findings should be reassuring.

What can policy makers do in day-to-day decision making to strengthen citizens' belief that the political system is legitimate? Much literature has highlighted that the realization of citizens' personal preferences in policy making is an important driver of legitimacy beliefs. We argue that citizens, in addition, also care about whether a policy represents the preferences of the majority of citizens, even if their personal preference diverges from the majority's. Using the case of the European Union (EU) as a system that has recurringly experienced crises of public legitimacy, we conduct a vignette survey experiment in which respondents assess the legitimacy of fictitious EU decisions that vary in how they were taken and whose preferences they represent. Results from original surveys conducted in the five largest EU countries show that the congruence of EU decisions not only with personal opinion but also with different forms of majority opinion significantly strengthens legitimacy beliefs. We also show that the most likely mechanism behind this finding is the application of a ‘consensus heuristic’, by which respondents use majority opinion as a cue to identify legitimate decisions. In contrast, procedural features such as the consultation of interest groups or the inclusiveness of decision making in the institutions have little effect on legitimacy beliefs. These findings suggest that policy makers can address legitimacy deficits by strengthening majority representation, which will have both egotropic and sociotropic effects.

Since the late 2000s, activists involved in conflicts over urban space and municipal budgets in a number of Czech cities have had an increasing tendency to enter the formal political realm in order to disrupt non-transparent ties between politicians and private business, and to narrow the gap between public administration and citizens. According to critical urban theorists, similar reformist strategies tend to end up co-opted by the status quo and are ineffective in ending neoliberal urbanization. This paper shows that in a context affected by the communist past and a long tradition of non-participatory political culture, the transformative potential of radical approaches may be diminished, whereas reformist strategies, such as increasing government transparency and institutionalizing participatory practices, can be more productive in terms of taming haphazard development and the extraction of municipal assets, and even the potential to reduce the democratic deficit within their cities.

The use of informal instruments in international governance has raised concerns about their legal status, including questioning whether they should be approved by domestic parliaments. These concerns are often dismissed by reference to the legal non-bindingness and claimed harmlessness of the instruments. Yet informal instruments have various effects in society as legal and political communications. These effects emphasize the need to address the democratic deficit of informal instruments resulting from their isolation from the parliaments and the undemocratic nature of international decision-making. This article proposes a twofold approach to address this deficit. At the domestic level, better engagement of parliamentarians through deliberative ‘feedback loops’ established between the parliament and the government should be sought, complemented by parliamentary approval of important informal instruments. At the international level, so-called ‘culture of deliberativism’, that is, a turn to deliberation by embracing deliberative democratic standards for better representation of public opinions, is proposed to induce democratic sensibility into international decision-making and its products. The legal status and potential bindingness should not be the focus of public debate on informal instruments; their subtle effects and undemocratic origin are the real ‘phantom menace’ in need of addressing.

This article approaches the issue of the European Union’s (EU) democratic deficit from a Marxist perspective. This issue has been central to the exponential rise of Euroscepticism that influenced processes like Brexit and Grexit (despite the latter’s frustration), as well as the rise of explicitly anti-EU national governments in European countries. This article shows that critiques of the EU’s democratic deficit (even cutting-edge ones, like the one placing emphasis on the notion of the ‘economic constitution’) are inadequate because the debate is already embedded in ideological compromise. Offering a brief exposition of the Marxist approach to the democratic form of the capitalist state, it attempts to show the limitations of critical approaches which overlook the issue of class rule and state power in their calls for democratisation. To do so, the article outlines the structural function and class character of the EU, as well as its role as a (supra-)state formation in the process of capital accumulation. Ultimately, it offers a Janus-faced critique of democratic deficit in Europe, one the one hand arguing that the critique of the EU economic constitution as neoliberal is limited because it fails to account for the scope of reform that the EU allows to respond to the challenges of the process of capital accumulation, while on the other concluding that the solution to the democratic deficit cannot simply be a return to nation-state democracy which is equidistant from actual self-government of the popular strata as its EU counterpart.

Processes of public engagement in decision-making and research are increasingly discussed as ways of addressing democratic deficits in high-income countries. In this paper, we explore why these processes of engagement and involvement in the UK have been less successfully incorporated into social security policymaking aimed at the out-of-work by drawing a comparison with health policy, a sphere in which these processes have now become orthodox (albeit imperfect). There is, for example, no formal or institutionalised imperative to involve people with lived experience of out-of-work social security benefits in processes of policy development. Government departments might focus group new policies with members of the public or hold periodic discussions with beneficiaries but in recent years there have been a number of major reforms to out-of-work social security which have been developed almost entirely without involving those affected. This would have been unacceptable in the health policy arena. We argue that this difference is rooted in structural differences in how the field of power for this form of social policy is organised, in the different social imaginaries which construct patients and out-of-work beneficiaries, and in the limited scope for solidarity and collective action around resisting the stigmatisation of out-of-work beneficiaries.

Scholars are increasingly interested in ‘populist attitudes’, which – studies show – can explain party support and vote choice. However, current research has not yet analyzed in detail the characteristics of those individuals with populist proclivities, or so-called populist citizens. To address this research gap, we harmonize survey data on populist attitudes for nine European countries, five Latin American countries, and Turkey in order to uncover shared or distinct features of populist citizens. Our findings are threefold. First, we identify differences in the sociodemographic characteristics of populist citizens, notably between Europe and Latin America. Second, we find similar patterns of heterogeneity in the political features of populist citizens. Third, we show that populist citizens across all countries have the same democratic profile. They systematically support democracy over other forms of government, while being dissatisfied with its implementation. This suggests populist attitudes are intrinsic to the political culture of contemporary democracies.

This article explores the dynamics of antigender mobilization in Poland and shows how gender equality projects are interconnected with the rise of opponents of “gender ideology.” It highlights material and discursive links between the local implementation of gender mainstreaming and the antigenderist backlash. The article points out that particular gender equality policies in non-Western settings result from Europeanization and thus are marked by a significant democratic deficit—that is, they are promoted without engaging a wider audience and elude parliamentary control. The study shows that if gender equality projects, such as gender mainstreaming, are fostered by external international commitments and obscure bureaucratic measures, they may unintentionally provide the impetus for antigender mobilization. Indeed, gender wars are fueled not only by controversies over gender and LGBT equality but also by growing concerns about citizens’ control over the state and its policies. The article is data based, and by employing framing analysis, it provides an explanation of the recent political success of antigenderist campaigns, which take place in a world of reconfigured states and diminishing democracies.