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by Jean Blondel (Author), Richard Sinnott (Author), Palle Svensson (Author)
The power of the European Parliament has been steadily and visibly increasing in recent years. At the same time, however, the already low rate of turnout in European elections has declined. Based on extensive new data, this important study probes the foundations of participation, democracy, and legitimacy in the European Union, and examines the ways in which participation and democratic representation might be enhanced.
Author Biography
Richard Sinnott was educated at University College Dublin and Georgetown University. He worked as a research fellow at the ESRI (The Economic and Social Research Institute), Dublin before joining the Department of Politics in UCD. Since 1989 he has been Director of CEEPA (Centre for European Economic and Public Affairs), a research and postgraduate teaching centre at UCD. He has held research fellowships at the European University Institute, Florence, at the Center for Science and International Affairs and the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, at the Institute for Security Studies, The Western European Union, Paris and at the Graduate School of Political Science, Waseda University, Tokyo. He has also been a visiting lecturer at the Department de Ciencia Politica i Dret Public, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. Palle Svensson is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. From 1984-85 he was Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. He has been a member of the editorial board and editor of the Danish political science journal Politica, and Co-chairman of the Tempus project for the development of political science in Czechoslovakia. He is the Chairman of the People's University in Aarhus and Consultant to the Danish Foreign Ministry on democratization and elections. Jean Blondel was educated in Paris (Institut d'études politiques and Faculty of Law of the University of Paris) and at Oxford (St Antony's College). He became lecturer in political institutions at the University of Keele (Staffordshire) in 1958, was ACLS Fellow at Yale in 1963-4 and the founding professor of the Department of Government at the University of Essex in 1964 where he remained up to 1983. He co-founded the European Consortium of political Research in 1970 and directed it up to 1978. He was Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York in 1984 and Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence to which he has remained attached.
