Democracy and Legitimacy in the European Union Revisited

摘要: Whether their analytic frameworks focus on institutional form and practices or its interactive construction, scholars have analyzed the EU’s democratic legitimacy mainly in terms of trade-offs between output effectiveness policies outcomes for people input participation by representation people. Missing is theorization “throughput” efficiency, accountability, transparency, openness to consultation with internal governance processes. The paper argues that adding this category facilitates assessment these legitimizing mechanisms’ interdependencies consideration reforms could turn trilemma into a “virtuous circle”.