RMES student Danai Petropoulou Ionescu has published her first academic article (open access) titled ‘Democratic Legitimacy and Soft Law in the EU Legal Order: A Theoretical Perspective‘ in the Journal of Contemporary European Research (JCER), co-authored with Prof. Mariolina Eliantonio.
The article discusses the democratic credentials of EU soft law and proposes an assessment framework to evaluate the legitimacy of soft law measures in the EU.
The article is an adaptation of Danai’s MaRBLe BA thesis, which won the Student Prize awarded by the Stichting Wetenschapsbeoefening for 2019.
The article aims to provide a normative direction for the empirical assessment of EU soft law and discusses the democratic credentials that EU soft law measures should fulfil to ensure their legitimacy. Drawing from the intersections of liberal, republican and deliberative conceptions of democracy, the article proposes four democratic legitimacy standards for the evaluation of soft law measures in practice: parliamentary involvement, transparency, participatory quality and reviewability.
