The Eurozone’s Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy. Can the EU Rebuild Public Trust and Support for European Economic Integration?

Summary:

To analyze questions of democratic legitimacy during the Eurozone crisis, this paper turns for definitions to the systems concepts often used in the EU-focused studies of democratic theory. These include the ‘output’ effectiveness and performance of EU policies; the EU’s ‘input’ responsiveness to citizens’ political demands and concerns; and the ‘throughput’ quality of EU policymaking processes, judged by their efficacy, accountability, transparency, and inclusiveness. For the ways in which EU institutional actors employ these concepts in the dynamics of legitimation, the paper turns to the analytic framework of discursive institutionalism, which considers the substantive content of ideas and the interactive processes of discourse in institutional context. Most useful is the discursive institutionalist analysis of the ways in which EU institutional actors seek to legitimate their reinterpretations through a coordinative discourse of policy construction and/or a communicative discourse of political legitimation with the public.

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