Challenges to Parliamentary Politics

Intertwined political and economic crises have battered citizens of EU-states for several years now. Due to demanding austerity politics "democracy" seems to remain, in many cases, only an empty phrase. This book examines the challenges to parliamentary politics today but also explores its means to develop, reform and even survive. The book approaches these questions in terms of political rhetoric and conceptual history as well as more traditional style of political philosophy. The writers of this volume come from different European backgrounds, providing a versatile discussion and a fruitful insight to parliamentarism today in Europe. Different perspectives comprise a historico-theoretical discussion, for example, by viewing parliament as a victim of its own success, by seeing the European Parliament as a historically new possibility for democratic representation and by giving a sceptical view of parliamentary democracy in modern mass conditions.