The Quality of National Democracy in the European Union
Pepper D. Culpepper
The goal of this research is to investigate the effect on national democracies of the separation between national party competition, which takes place at the level of member-states, and the authority to make definitive policy decisions, which sits increasingly at the level of the EU. The project examines how three different institutional devices ameliorate or exacerbate this problem: the use of referenda; the use of experiments in deliberative politics (this is a project already in progress in collaboration with Archon Fung); and the change of mainstream national party programs to allow direct competition on European issues.