Democracy and symbiosis in the European Union: Towards a confederal consociation?

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Abstract
In attempting to assess the new political dynamics of European Union, this article introduces the concept of ‘confederal consociation’ as a key to understanding the changing nature of the relationship between democracy and integration in the 1990s. It suggests that the consociational dimension of the latter effectively weakens the infrastructure of transnational democracy since it favours a distinctive pattern of political interaction whereby executive‐centred elites, rather than the individual citizen‐voter, become the decisive force in determining European Union ‘polities’, thus further exacerbating the already highly problematic relationship between rulers and ruled within and between the component political systems.

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