Input and output legitimacy of the EU revisited

The paper has two goals. First, it criticizes the existing conceptualisation of democratic deficit which is based on the notions of “input” and “output” legitimacy. Lincoln’s popular definition of democracy has three components: the government of the people, by the people, for the people. While the mainstream literature focuses on the latter two – who governs (input) and for whom (output) – the first component (who is governed) is usually neglected. My paper argues that the European “people” already exists – as an entity which is governed. The EU democratic deficit should be conceptualised as a mismatch between who is governed (the people) and who governs (the states). The second goal of the paper is to formulate new typology of the EU’s political architecture. The typology should distinguish three different dimensions. First we need to ask who is governed – the people or the states? The second dimension deals with the question who governs (the people or the states) and the third dimension measures the scope of the competences of the European government. While the current EU government can be best described as a government of the people by the states with ever widening competences, the future evolution of the European political architecture remains an open question.