Legitimacy and deliberation in supranational political organizations - the case of European Parliament plenary debates

Sammanfattning: The last four decades have witnessed two crucial sociopolitical trends: the increasing dissolution of spatial and temporal boundaries. While they entail both challenges and opportunities for every kind of organization, political organizations are particularly affected, having seriously questioned their problem-solving abilities and thus also their legitimacy. In the special case of supranational political organizations those challenges arise beyond a seemingly inherent problem of legitimization: the democratic deficit. Ensuing from a normative stance, this thesis addresses a relatively emergent field of political theory: deliberative democracy; and investigates whether supranational political deliberation could serve as a means to legitimately promote ethical and moral decision-making beyond the national political sphere. Correspondingly, the thesis aims to answer the interrelated research questions: How can the legitimacy of supranational political organizations be theoretically reconceptualized? and What are the effects of deliberation on decisions in consensus-oriented political bodies? Drawing on Habermasian discourse ethics and Steenbergen et al.'s "Discourse Quality Index" (DQI), this thesis develops a new concept of supranational political legitimacy, advocating an encompassing input, throughput and output perspective, and trials the theoretically assumed causality between deliberation and decision outcomes by analyzing plenary debates of the European Parliament. Empirical results of 18 analyzed debates comprising 456 single speech acts show that the theoretically established causality between deliberation and decision outcomes cannot be sustained in reality. In order to counter the challenges posed by the increasing dissolution of spatial and temporal boundaries, those results paradoxically speak for both speeding up decision-making by lowering deliberation time as well as slowing down decision-making by enhancing organizational learning.