Understanding the ‘EU democratic deficit’: a two-dimension concept on a three level-of-analysis

This paper acknowledges the still unsettled debate on the EU democratic deficit by arguing that divergences among the scholars emanate from the methodological and the conceptual difficulties that the concept itself have when applied to the case of EU. Given the lack of a common ground for understanding the EU democratic deficit debate I propose an all-inclusive model ('Democratic Deficit Space') of how to understand the EU democratic deficit arguments in the enormous already existing literature. As a last but not least point this paper will suggest how we need to look at the EU democratic deficit, putting the emphasis on the 'deficit' term rather than on the 'democracy' term.