Democracy is conventionally understood as “delegation with accountability”. As such, it presupposes the existence of a demos from which the matching chains of delegation and accountability must, respectively, depart from and arrive to.

Moreover, these chains must ideally be unbroken, but the European Union inserts breaks in both, and this affects the nature and quality of both European national and EU democracies (though the phenomenon is arguably more widespread). In this project, Simona wants question the premise of this notion of democracy – that there exists a pre-defined demos which is the alpha and omega of democratic delegation and accountability – and explore the normative principles that could sustain a different notion of democracy based on a plurality of overlapping and differently defined demoi that could cooperate in the construction of a multilevel, multidemoi democracy.

The European Union, for its particular configuration, is a privileged observation point for such a construction. In a suggestive (and not yet fully developed manner) she identifies breakdowns in the working of democracy as delegation with accountability and suggest multilevel, multidemoi corrective with reference to procedures introduced in EU policy-making.

Simona Piattoni (BA/MA Economics, Bocconi University; PhD Political Science, MIT) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Trento (Italy). Her main research interests concern regional development policy, multilevel governance and democracy in interconnected settings. The most recent publications are: The Theory of Multilevel Governance: Conceptual, Empirical and Normative Challenges (OUP 2010); The European Union: Democratic Principles and Institutional Architectures in Times of Crisis (OUP 2015); (with Justus Schönlau) Shaping Policy from Below: EU Democracy and the Committee of the Regions (Edward Elgar 2015).