Among Arguments Advanced In Favour Of Direct Democracy, legitimacy pleas loom large. If the rules governing people can only be legitimate when those rules arise from and represent the will of all, then it is commonly argued that people should have the right to vote not just for representatives but on substantive issues of public policy as well. To claim otherwise is regarded as anti-democratic: for example, Bogdanor writes that ‘in the final analysis, the arguments against referendums are arguments against democracy’, while Saward asks, ‘What better way to maximize responsiveness of rulers to the ruled than by fostering a system in which the ruled themselves make the decisions?’

This Article Discusses The Importance Of Social Learning For Eu public policy-making in general and regional policy in particular. The first section analyses the implications of the learning process for EU regional policy and examines its social and institutional prerequisites. Section two introduces the concepts of social capital and institutional networks as components crucial for the learning process and socialization function. The third section, based on the analysis of the role of social learning, delineates the multi-level system of governance in EU regional policy. The fourth section presents empirical evidence from Greek regions on the role of social learning in the implementation of EU regional policy (Structural Funds) programmes. Finally, the last section draws conclusions on the role of social learning in EU regional policy and lessons from the Greek experience.

Today's Democratic Theory Offers Sketches Of Tomorrow's democratic polity. How innovative, and how compelling, are the visions it offers us? This article explores possible democratic futures by scanning a selection of today's key democratic innovations – cosmopolitan, deliberative, ‘politics of presence’, ecological, associative and party-based direct models – in the light of a set of six central issues useful for examining the core aspects of democratic theories. It concludes by suggesting a way forward in which insights from diverse innovations might helpfully be accommodated within an overarching framework. Overall, it represents a deliberate attempt at a bird's eye view of the subject; the aim is to be suggestive rather than definitive. The scope of the analysis is broad but quite strictly qualified in the following ways: the six innovative ideas scrutinized arise from, and largely address, countries of the rich North rather than the developing South; they do not exhaust the range of current innovations in democratic theory; and they are based largely on English-language sources.