Vivien A. Schmidt

Democratic legitimacy in any polity can be analysed in terms of the ‘output’ effectiveness and performance of its policies, the ‘input’ participation and representation of citizens along with governing elites' responsiveness, and the ‘throughput’ procedural quality of governance in terms of accountability, transparency, inclusiveness, and openness, as well as efficacy. In the European Union (EU), democratic legitimacy is split between the national level for political input, the EU level for policy output and procedural throughput. This has had a significant impact on national democracy, which has experienced increasing politicization as a result. The chapter illustrates this mainly with the emergency politics of the Eurozone crisis and the COVID-19 crisis.

Scholars of international relations and comparative politics have long theorised about the development of the European Union as a ‘polity’ beyond the nation-state, in particular with regard to who ...

Policy formulation is highly political. Yet much of the policy-making literature neglects this important insight, with the politics of expertise and coalition-formation often presented as apolitica...

This article builds on existing scholarship on populism while shifting the lens to focus on the ideational and discursive dynamics of populist power. It defines populism as, at its core, the discursive construction of discontent, as charismatic leaders claiming to speak for the people against the elites use post-truth language to give expression to peoples’ grievances, to mobilize them via real and virtual networks of support, and to disseminate their ideas via social and traditional media in order to win elections and then to govern differently. This article deploys the discursive institutionalist framework of analysis to consider the four main features of the discursive construction of populism – the message, the messenger, the medium, and the milieu. Throughout, the article illustrates by considering not only the rise of populist anti-system parties in European countries but also the special challenges this poses for the EU.

Emergency politics raises theoretical questions about the legitimacy of executive authorities’ governing activities in times of crisis, and in particular whether ensuring effective outcomes (output) can make up for the temporary suspension of political responsiveness (input) and accountable procedures (throughput). Answers depend not only on the specifics of the emergency actions but also on executives’ rhetorical power to legitimize such actions via ideational/discursive coercion, structuring, or persuasion. After outlining the theoretical issues involved, this contribution considers the legitimacy and rhetorical power of political executives in multilateral emergency politics and technical executives in supranational emergency politics. It uses the cases of the Council and the ECB in the Eurozone and Covid-19 crises in illustration, considering their legitimacy over time, between a crisis’ fast-burning phase of emergency politics and its slow-burning phase of legitimizing normalization or delegitimation.