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Political legitimacy between democracy and effectiveness: trade-offs, interdependencies, and discursive constructions by the EU institutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2014

Claudia S. Sternberg
Claudia S. Sternberg*
Affiliation:
Career Development Fellow in Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations, St Hugh’s College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
*
*E-mail: claudiacsternberg@gmail.com
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Abstract

This paper addresses the relationship between political legitimacy arising from a link with the ‘will of the people’, and political legitimacy arising from beneficial consequences for them. Questioning the common assumption of an inherent trade-off between ‘input’ and ‘output legitimacy’, it suggests that the two necessarily go together, and that their relationship is continuously reconstructed through discursive contestation. These claims are first substantiated conceptually, in reference to the legitimacy literature in European Union (EU) Studies, which is situated in the broader fields of Political Theory and Comparative Politics. In a second step, the argument is developed on the grounds of empirical case material: an interpretive, non-quantitative reconstruction of the changing discourses on EU legitimacy by the European institutions from the 1950s to the early 2000s.

Keywords

European Unioninput and output legitimacyinterpretive qualitative discourse analysispolitical legitimacy
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , November 2015 , pp. 615 - 638
Copyright
© European Consortium for Political Research 2014 

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References

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