Is there a Democratic Deficit in CSDP? An Empirical Qualitative Investigation
Evangelos Fanoulis, University of Essex
This paper, part of a PhD project, empirically investigates whether there is a democratic deficit in post-Lisbon CSDP, regarding the deficit primarily as the lack of a policy's legitimacy. The paper commences with an evaluation of CSDP's input and output legitimacy, aetiologising why researchers should focus on input and not output legitimacy. It further argue that the input indirect legitimisation of CSDP is of poor quality, with practical difficulties to alter the situation, a fact which forces practitioners and EU experts to also consider the input direct legitimisation of the policy. The following section firstly justifies the choice of a. EU policymakers' non-willingness to involve citizenry in the CSDP's design, and b. citizens' low willingness to participate in the policy-making, as independent variables for assessing the quality of CSDP's input direct legitimisation. Secondly, it explains why qualitative research has been chosen for investigating the two independent variables (with particular reference to the qualitative method of cross-examination or triangulation), answering in addition methodological questions of selection bias, reliability and validity. The paper's third part describes the qualitative research based on both a. semi-structured interviews with high ranking administrators in the European External Action Service (EEAS) to empirically interrogate the policy-makers' perspective, and b. Qualitative analysis of Eurobarometer Surveys to inspect EU citizenry's willingness to actively participate in the making of CSDP. The fourth part of the paper presents the results of the qualitative research and explores whether it confirm the main hypothesis of a democratic deficit by means of CSDP's adequate legitimisation.