Magnette, Paul --- "Democracy in the European Union: Why and How Combine Representation and Participation?" [2006] ELECD 131; in Smismans, Stijn (ed), "Civil Society and Legitimate European Governance" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: Civil Society and Legitimate European Governance

Editor(s): Smismans, Stijn

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843769460

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Democracy in the European Union: Why and How Combine Representation and Participation?

Author(s): Magnette, Paul

Number of pages: 19

Extract:

2. Democracy in the European Union:
why and how to combine
representation and participation?
Paul Magnette

The political and academic discourse on the `democratic deficit' in the
European Union was marked by a noticeable semantic change in the 1990s.
Until then, it had merely been cast in institutional and formal terms, and
focused on the evolution of the European Parliament. In the EP's argument,
backed by a large part of the legal doctrine and by the Court of Justice, the
EU's democratic deficit was equated with a parliamentary deficit. Since the
mid-1990s, this discourse has been less concerned with institutional issues and
ever more concentrated on the role `civil society' plays or could play in
European governance.
This chapter argues that these two streams of thought should not be
divorced, as they often are.1 While the formalist parliamentary approach,
ignoring the role of non-public actors in EU governance, missed a large part
of the picture, the new discourse on civil society tends to overestimate the
importance of `non-conventional' forms of participation, and to neglect the
central function of classic representative mechanisms.
In the first part of this chapter, I recall that the semantic shift from
representative government to participatory governance reflects intellectual
evolutions as much as political changes. In the second part, I examine the most
sophisticated attempt to theorise decentralised and participatory forms of EU
governance, under the label of `directly deliberative polyarchy'. I then stress
the limits of this new paradigm in ...