Democracy and Legitimacy in the European Union Revisited - Input, Output and Throughput

Whether their analytic frameworks focus on institutional form and practices or on its interactive construction, scholars have analyzed the EU’s democratic legitimacy mainly in terms of the trade-offs between the output effectiveness of EU’s policies outcomes for the people and the input participation by and representation of the people. Missing is theorization of the throughput efficiency, accountability, transparency, and openness to consultation with the people of the EU’s internal governance processes. The paper argues that adding this analytic category facilitates assessment of these legitimizing mechanisms’ interdependencies and facilitates consideration of reforms that could turn this democratic trilemma into a virtuous circle.democracy; legitimacy; Europeanization; Europeanization

A Constitutional Political Economy Perspective on International Trade

International Relations/Trade,

Representation, representativeness, and accountability in EU-civil society relations

Contribution to the CONNEX Final Conference "Efficient and Democratic Governance in a Multi-Level Europe", Mannheim, March 6-8, 2008; Workshop 5: Putting EU civil society involvement under scrutiny; Panel: A normative view on civil society involvement

EU Member States’ Humanitarian Assistance and Issue Salience in Public Discourse: Preliminary Findings for the 2000 to 2008 Period

The establishment of the European External Action Service (EEAS) that took place with the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty lays the basis for a potentially more coherent and better-structured approach of the European Union to the issue of the provision of humanitarian aid. Within such a context, this paper investigates the relationship between the provision of emergency financial assistance and the extent of the presence of the issue of humanitarian aid in public discourse in seven EU member states. The empirical findings highlight a strong correlation between increases in issue salience and increases in the provision of humanitarian assistance as well as a significant concomitant variation in the issue cycles of the investigated EU member states.discourse; Europeanization; Europeanization

The European and the national in communication research

The article discusses some of the major omissions and simplifications created by established approaches to European communication, in particular the inclination to think of Europeanization primarily, and often exclusively, in relation to things national. It points to the simplistic narrative that sees transnational communication in Europe as a very recent phenomenon, and demonstrates how this narrative glosses over various historical forms of transnational communication in Europe. It then briefly addresses the intellectual roots of this narrative, and argues that they also lead to neglecting the existence of diverse, often competing contemporary forms of Europeanization and transnationalization in public communication. Finally, the article argues that more sustained attention should be paid to subnational patterns of stratification of European communication, particularly those arising along class divisions

Programmable generator of synchronous pulse sequences

Předmětem práce je analýza dostupných technologií a následná implementace programovatelného vícekanálového sekvenceru pulzů za využití hradlového pole. Předmětem praktické části je samotný vývoj řešení v jazyce Verilog a jeho simulace a následné nasazení na hradlové pole. Rozlišení dosahující 1 ns bylo dosaženo za pomocí specializovanáno formátování instrukcí. Zařízení bylo také doplněno komunikační aplikací.The objective of this thesis is to analyze of the available technology and the eventual implementation of a programmable multichannel pulse sequencer using a gate array. The goal of the practical part is the actual development using the Verilog hardware description language, simulation, and the hardware realization of said device. Resolutions reaching 1 ns were achieved using specialized instruction formatting. The device is also accompanied by a communication application

Europeanised Attitudes, Nationalised Communication? Evidence on the Patterns behind Political Communication Output in Brussels

Studies of a communication deficit in the European Union (EU) have hardly taken a systematic look at the site where most of the political communication output is being created: within the elite bubble of EU politicians and correspondents in Brussels. This study builds on the communication culture approach to describe and explain the basic attitudinal patterns of EU politicians and journalists who critically shape the political communication output coming out of Brussels that is being consumed by European citizens. Based on a survey with more than 300 participating politicians and journalists, this study demonstrates that the internationalised communication context in Brussels reduces differences between the attitudes of actors from professional and national groups. We demonstrate that there is a tendency toward common elitist attitudes, complemented by a highly negative view of the public and a cynical mode of political communication. However, we observe predominantly national contact networks in Brussels and partly differing attitudes among some sub-groups of politicians and journalists, reflecting the partly conflicting national configurations of the European political and media system and the principal-agent relationships of EU politicians and journalists with their constituencies and media outlets

Crisis Acting in The Destroyed Room

The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant epistemological source of the real in the twenty-first century. The atomisation of reality into the porous realm of the digital has spawned conspiratorial internet sub-cultures dedicated to immersing us all in a state of perpetual crisis. Conspiracy theories like crisis acting are thriving in this milieu. This theory was popularised by the host of InfoWars Alex Jones who argued high school shootings are events staged by the government. This article appropriates the term 'crisis acting' from the alt-right political lexicon to analyse how the experience of living in media wreckage is performed on the intermedial stage of The Destroyed Room (Vanishing Point 2016). The performance is a semi-improvised conversation between three actors who debate the morality of watching videos depicting Islamic State executions, the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, the refugee crisis and scenes of natural disasters. Terror, social media and climate breakdown constitute the three pieces of media wreckage that are staged The Destroyed Room. It is argued that constructing narratives of reality with media wreckage turns us all into crisis actors who cannot imagine ways of performing in the world as political agents outside of digital spaces

Mapping European ideoscapes: examining newspaper debates on the EU Constitution in seven European countries

Despite embracing the rhetoric of transnational flows and networks, comparative research on media content continues to fall prey to methodological nationalism. When it comes to empirical measurement, researchers often, despite their best intentions, fall back on techniques that assume that the discourses circulating within particular nationally bounded communicative spaces are homogenous. In this article, we developed a set of propositions and analytical approaches that should help to overcome this impasse, and used them to examine the newspaper debates on the EU Constitutional Treaty in seven European states: the Czech Republic, Germany, France, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the UK. We suggested that instead of focusing solely on comparisons between nationally bounded communicative spheres, we should also look at differences between class-related communicative spaces. By adopting such an approach, we can acknowledge both sub-national segmentations of communicative spaces and transnational linkages, while at the same time not losing sight of the importance of the national. The results support our initial contention that the research on European mass communication ought to move beyond comparisons between national units and the levels of their respective Europeanization, and examine how European issues are conveyed in media catering to different social classes

input, output and throughput

1\. Introduction 5 2\. EU Legitimizing Mechanisms: Output, Input and Throughput 6 3\. Output Legitimacy 11 3.1 Institutional Regulatory Output 11 3.2 Constructive Discursive Output 13 4\. Input Legitimacy 16 4.1 Institutional Representative Input 16 4.2 Constructive Deliberative Input 18 5\. Throughput Legitimacy 20 5.1 Institutional Pluralist Throughput 21 5.2 Institutional Rules-Based Throughput 22 5.3 Constructive Deliberative Throughput 24 6\. Conclusion: Input, Output and Throughput as Democratic Trilemma or Virtuous Circule? 26 Literature 28Whether their analytic frameworks focus on institutional form and practices or on its interactive construction, scholars have analyzed the EU’s democratic legitimacy mainly in terms of the trade-offs between the output effectiveness of EU’s policies outcomes for the people and the input participation by and representation of the people. Missing is theorization of the “throughput” efficiency, accountability, transparency, and openness to consultation with the people of the EU’s internal governance processes. The paper argues that adding this analytic category facilitates assessment of these legitimizing mechanisms’ interdependencies and facilitates consideration of reforms that could turn this democratic trilemma into a “virtuous circle”