Public lecture

28.11.2015

Professor Simona Piattoni from the University of Trento, Italy, will present her recently published book (with (Oxford University Press) entitled

The European Union:
Democratic Principles and Institutional Architectures in Times of Crisis

on 7 December 2015 from 14.15 at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Education (Lossi 36-305)

The institutional architecture of the European Union has always been characterized by tensions and fissures which threaten to destabilize its edifice, but these become even more visible and dangerous in times of crisis. Scholarship has normally departed from the existing structure of the Union to discuss its democratic qualities (or lack thereof), while in this volume we departed from democratic principles to discuss which institutional architectures could be conceived for the Union in order to deliver democratically legitimate decisions also in times of crisis. In my personal contribution, I argue that the Union has shown a remarkable degree of resilience thanks to its ‘haptic’ qualities, which combine vulnerability with adaptability. Starting from a normative discussion of the democratic principles that should sustain an interconnected construct like the Union, I will therefore highlight governance and institutional developments that could be read either as progress towards ‘shared and responsible sovereignty’.

Prof. Simona Piattoni (BA/MA Economics, Bocconi; PhD Political Science, MIT) teaches comparative politics, European politics and local government at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento. She has published on clientelism (S. Piattoni (ed), Clientelism, Interests and Democratic Representation, Cambridge University Press 2001), governance (T. Christiansen and S. Piattoni (eds), Informal Governance in the European Union, Edward Elgar 2003; S. Piattoni, The Theory of Multilevel Governance, Oxford University Press 2010) and EU democracy (S. Piattoni (ed),The European Union: Democratic Principles and Institutional Architectures in Times of Crisis, Oxford University Press 2015).