Abstract
The Lisbon Treaty contained three institutional innovations that were designed to make the European Union (EU) more democratic: the Ordinary Legislative Procedure (OLP), the Early Warning Mechanism (EWM) for national parliaments, and the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). This short article sets the stage for a symposium that assesses whether the three mechanisms have indeed contributed to the EU’s democratization. It situates OLP, EWM, and ECI in the EU’s system of multilevel democracy and raises the question of whether the mechanisms address the institutional and societal factors that cause the EU’s democratic deficit.
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Notes
See also the preamble to the Lisbon Treaty, which notes that the treaty desires ‘to complete the process started by the Treaty of Amsterdam and by the Treaty of Nice with a view to enhancing the efficiency and democratic legitimacy of the Union’ (Official Journal of the European Union, 2007/C 306/01, p. 3).
This definition bears a clear resemblance to the concept of demoi-cracy (Nicolaïdis, 2013; Cheneval et al. 2015). We prefer the term multilevel democracy since it does not, by definition, treat any one of the political levels as more important, or normatively more valuable, than the other(s). By contrast, demoi-cracy, in most of its versions, explicitly privileges the decentral units of decision-making over the central ones.
In addition, the European Council, composed of democratically elected heads of state or government, was strengthened vis-à-vis the European Commission by giving it formal treaty status and its own Brussels-based presidency.
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Acknowledgements
This symposium was organized by the Jean Monnet Chair ‘Democracy in the European Union’ at Carleton University, funded under the EU’s Erasmus+ Programme. Previous versions of all contributions were presented in June 2017 at the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) conference in Toronto and in a research seminar at Carleton University. The authors thank all participants in these events, as well as the anonymous referees who reviewed the contributions, for their comments and suggestions. We are grateful to the editors of Comparative European Politics, as well as to editorial assistant Uzma Azhar, for their advice and support.
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Hurrelmann, A., Baglioni, S. Introduction: multilevel democracy in the European Union and the innovations of the Lisbon Treaty. Comp Eur Polit 17, 910–918 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-018-0135-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-018-0135-0