Governance vs. politics: the European Union’s constitutive ‘democratic deficit’

Abstract: Governance practices fail key democratic tests coming from interest aggregation, deliberative and agonistic theories of democracy. It is argued that the European Union is best described as a complex web of governance practices and, therefore, that its 'democratic deficit' is constitutive. In contrast to what is often thought, it is not by strengthening 'good governance' practices but by treading parallel paths of constitutionalization and politicization that the European Union could eventually close the democratic gap.