Peter Mair is Professor of comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Jacques Thomassen is distinguished Professor of politics at the University of Twente, the Netherlands.

1. Democracy without Democracy?: Can the EU's Democratic 'Outputs' be Separated from the Democratic 'Inputs' Provided by Competitive Parties and Majority Rule? 2. Political Representation and Government in the European Union 3. The European Parliament: One Parliament, Several Modes of Political Representation on the Ground? 4. Consistent Choice Sets? The Stances of Political Parties towards European Integration in 10 Central East European Democracies, 2003-2007 5. With or Without You? Revisiting territorial state-bypassing in EU interest representation 6. Civil Society and EU Democracy: 'Astroturf' Representation? 7. The EU's many Representative Modes: Colliding? Cohering?

This book confronts and discusses different conceptions of political representation with respect to their application to the system of multi-level governance in the European Union. Political representation is an essentially contested concept. Its meaning has evolved with the development of representative democracy at the level of the nation state, and normative theories of political representation often evolved as a reflection on developing practices rather than the other way around.
Since the EU is not a conventional nation state, and since the effectiveness and legitimacy of classic notions of political representation at the level of the national state has also become a matter of dispute, the EU has become a playground for the development of alternative or additional conceptions of democracy. The contributions to this volume evaluate these alternative conceptions with regard to both their effectiveness and their legitimacy, and combine both conceptual and empirical analyses.
This book was based on a special issue of Journal of European Public Policy.