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Inventing the EU as a Democratic Polity pp 97–113Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Towards the Bases of Representative Democracy: Parliament, Citizenry and Government

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology ((PSEPS))

Abstract

The chapter sketches how the EU developed towards the triad of representative democracy over the decades. European unification first settled on an intergovernmental model of sovereign nation states cooperating in limited policy areas. This also meant leaving the question of democracy aside. Nevertheless, in today’s EU, we find all three dimensions of the triad of representative democracy—parliament, citizens-as-electorate and a government. They are linked to each other in very much the same way as in representative nation state democracies, that is, a parliament that is directly elected by the citizens, a citizenry that elects the parliament based on certain citizenship rights, and governmental actors that are responsible to parliament(s) and even depend on parliamentary majorities to a certain extent.

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  1. Department for Social and Cultural Sciences, Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Fulda, Germany

    Claudia Wiesner

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  1. Claudia Wiesner
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Correspondence to Claudia Wiesner .

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Wiesner, C. (2019). Towards the Bases of Representative Democracy: Parliament, Citizenry and Government. In: Inventing the EU as a Democratic Polity. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94415-9_7

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