Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PLATO (The Post-crisis Legitimacy of the European UnionEuropean Training Network)
Reporting period: 2019-01-01 to 2020-12-31
To investigate whether the EU has experienced a legitimacy crisis as a result of multiple other crises in European integration, PLATO (The Post-Crisis Legitimacy of the European Union) had the following objectives:
1. To build theory of what would count as a legitimacy crisis in the case of the EU
2. To design methods of evaluating whether the EU has experienced a legitimacy crisis
3. To use cases to generate new empirical understanding of whether the has experienced a legitimacy crisis
4. To combine the foregoing research with a training programme aimed to train future research leaders across sectors
5. To embed PLATO’s research findings in a new, improved state-of-the-art
PLATO has achieved those objectives through an Innovative Training Network of nine university partners from across Europe and eleven training partners from the policy advice, consulting, media, and career development sectors, as well as from civil society. The academic programme has trained 15 PhD researchers through a common multidisciplinary investigation into the EU’s legitimacy. The professional training has included professional skills, individual professional career planning and work experience from relevant sectors that provide the main users of research into the EU.
To use those three models to build new theory of what it would be for the EU to experience a legitimacy crisis, PLATO made two methodological innovations. First, it developed methods of investigating legitimacy crisis through case studies structured along three dimensions: the one corresponding to core standards and conditions needed for democratic legitimacy, namely public control with political equality, participation, representation, accountability, a public sphere, civil society relations, and a defined democratic political community; another dimension consisting of behaviours and attitudes that can be used to investigate the legitimacy of any political system: support, trust, awareness of the political system, compliance, complaint, protest; a final dimension consisting of actors with whom the EU needs to be legitimate: member governments, parliaments, citizens, officials, courts and civil society actors. Each of the 15 PhDs investigated a different combination of standards, behaviours and actors along those dimensions. Second, PLATO adapted a range of social science methods – process-tracing, focus groups, content analysis, and some quantitative methods - to the investigation of theoretical expectations of legitimacy crisis.
Using that research design and those research methods, the 15 cases find little support for the idea that the Union has experienced a legitimacy crisis. In contrast there is some evidence of adaptation to changing conditions of legitimation or of relegitimation.
By using three models to build theory of what it would be for the EU to experience a legitimacy crisis, PLATO then made three further moves beyond the state of the art. First, the three models allow new theory to be built from a plurality of conceptions of what is needed for the EU to be legitimate in the first place. Second, distinctions within the models and combinations between them allow for clearer understanding of exogenous and endogenous causes of legitimacy crises; or, in other words, the difference between legitimacy crises caused by factors external to the EU and those caused by the failure of the EU itself to adapt and repair its legitimacy problems. Third, applying the three PLATO models to the 15 PhD case studies has yielded important new understanding of several important questions in the study of politics and society: questions about power and legitimacy; about things that happen within states and beyond them; about social constructions of identities, meaning, politics and politicisation; about trust, accountability, public spheres, parliaments, civil society, stakeholders, democratic principals, democratic agents, norm diffusion; or, in short, many of the most basic building blocks of democratic politics within and beyond the democratic state.