Elections to the European parliament as a challenge for democracy

"The present book constitutes a second volume in a series of peer-reviewed publications on democracy and European integration, edited by the Center for Direct Democracy Studies (CCDS) at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bialystok, Poland. ...The main motivation for this book came from a long-term debate--yet recently spirited, due to the forthcoming 2014 elections--on the place of the European Parliament in the democratic life of the European Union (EU; the Union). The 18 chapters of this volume analyse a wide range of challenges for democracy posed by the EP elections. If we were to make a 'word cloud', it would be dominated by keywords such as democratic deficit, legitimacy crisis, low turnout, second-order elections, alternative voting methods, lack of European public space, non-existence of European parties as well as the need for a unifrom electoral procedure."--Preface.