Introduction

Edmund Burke’s ‘Speech to the Electors of Bristol’ reads as a contemporary opinion picturing the weakness of democratic control in European economic governance. Indeed, in the eurozone, those who deliberate became decoupled from those who decide, decision-making has not been preceded by deliberation and decision-makers’ autonomy has been constrained by external pressures. As a consequence, it has been widely acknowledged that the intergovernmental nature of economic reforms has deeply eroded the principle of representative democracy in the European Union (EU; Crum, 2013; Rittberger, 2014).