Abstract:
Efficient and democratic governance is not just a matter of the institutional architecture of the European Union. Rather, EU-society relations and structures of civic engagement have to be assessed. Is social capital a catalyst of civic engagement that extends from the local to the European level and how are stocks of social capital distributed across the EU nations? Is the EU plagued by biased representation and if so does it really matter? Is civil society a remedy to the perceived legitimacy crisis of the EU? How do we make sense of the divergent concepts of civil society and what role should civil society play in EU governance? Several contributions address the promises and shortcomings of participatory engineering and analyse the democratic potential of participatory governance both within the EU and as an export product to third countries.

Abstract:
Democracy, representation, accountability — all of these "good things" in politics require well-functioning elections. In order to understand the conditions under which elections are more or less likely to yield these desired effects (or other, conceivably unintended consequences) comparative studies — cross-system as well as over-time — are invaluable as they make it possible to explicitly link differences in these conditions with variations in the functioning of electoral processes. This volume contains the proceedings of a CONNEX-sponsored conference of the European Election Studies research group hold in March 2007. Thanks to the large range of expertise gathered, the resulting papers provide stimulating insights into the specificities and challenges of multilevel electoral systems in the EU and some of its member-countries.