Democratic dilemmas in EU multilevel governance: untangling the Gordian knot
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses what implications the European Union’s (EU’s) multilevel structure has for its democratic legitimacy. It identifies three channels of democratic input in the EU – the European Parliament, national democratic processes influencing the Council of Ministers, and civil society participation in consultation procedures of the European Commission – and assesses them on the basis of a comprehensive set of criteria. The evaluation shows that the democratization of the EU faces three interlinked dilemmas. Most fundamentally, there is an incongruence in territorial scope between the issues requiring democratic control (increasingly European if not global) and the imagined communities necessary for the functioning of democratic procedures (primarily national). This ‘congruence dilemma’ intensifies contradictions between participation and deliberation, as well as between effectiveness and accountability in EU decision-making. Grand reforms that would solve these dilemmas once and for all are unlikely to be successful, but changes in the interplay of the three democratic channels – such as the disentanglement of political competencies, the formalization of inter-channel conciliation procedures, and the introduction of directly democratic mechanisms – promise to mitigate their negative effects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".