For this assignments you need to use these articles plus you need to add another article that will connect all these articles together as well as two newspaper articles.
The EuropeanUnion, legitimacy and thereconstruction of state space (Ben Rosamond)
The Lure of Technocracy (Jürgen Habermas)
Democracy and Legitimacy in the European Union Revisited: Input, Output and ‘Throughput’
Word limit: 1400-1600
Hand in a .doc or .docx file!
The essay consists of the following elements:
Title
The different parts of the essay should not be indicated with subheadings (apart from the bibliography). The structure of the essay becomes apparent through the content of the paragraphs. The essay should however be provided with a concise title.
Introduction
Start your essay by introducing the subject. Why did you choose the subject, is your aim to explain a current event, or is there another reason why this needs to be discussed. The second paragraph should embed the subject within the academic literature. It should be a brief and concise introduction of the puzzle. This means that the academic debate that you contribute to is explained in a few sentences and that you explain the relevance of your empirical case to this debate. Make sure that it is a debate that you introduce, there are always different sides to a debate and you need to show these. At the end of your introduction, you state your position in the debate by means of a statement. The introduction typically consists of two to three paragraphs.
Thesis Statement
In this essay you argue for a particular position in an academic debate. This position is expressed in a thesis statement that is introduced in the introduction. The statement combines a theoretical insight with an empirical case.
- The following statement fails to incorporate a theoretical position: The arrest of Donald Trump is justified.
- The following statement fails to include an empirical case: American democracy depends on the legitimacy of its institutions.
- A complete statement would be: The arrest of Donald Trump undermines the legitimacy of America’s democratic institutions.
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Argumentation (Body)
The argumentation of essay has two steps. Firstly, start your argumentation by elaborating on the puzzle, explain the theoretical underpinnings of the debate. What are the main concepts of the theoretical positions? The aim is to show the academic relevance of your essay. For example, if you take the statement given above, you would have to explain how you define legitimacy and which democratic institutions you are referring to. You do this by drawing from the insights from other academic authors that are crucial to the debate. For this particular essay, you should at least incorporate two texts from Core debate 3 that we discussed in class (Habermas, Schmidt and/or Kuhn), furthermore, you should introduce 2 further authors that you have found through Web of Science.
The second step is to present the empirical information and connect it to the theoretical debate. You present information from reliable / high quality newspapers and explain how this should be interpreted based on your theoretical underpinnings that you discussed in step one. For example, your definition of legitimacy was based on the level of trust in democratic institutions, and you have an article from the New York Times that quotes Trump’s statements and you argue that these statements undermine the trust of his followers in these institutions. The newspaper articles should not be opinion pieces, but reports on current events.
This section should be based and contain (in-text) references to at least 4 academic sources and 2 newspaper articles. The academic sources should take part in the same academic debate, hence do not mix EU legitimacy with US elections.