PLATO — The Post-Crisis Legitimacy of the European Union

Funding: European Union, Horizon 2020 / Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network; 512,000 Euro (IHS Vienna share); January 2017 – December 2020

Co-investigators: Katrin Auel and Johannes Pollak (IHS Vienna); Lead partner: ARENA Research Center, Oslo

Status: Completed

Further information: http://www.plato.uio.no

The PLATO project investigated the legitimacy of the European Union’s responses to the financial crisis. It used the example of the financial crisis to build and test a theory of legitimacy crises in multi-state, non-state political systems. Legitimacy — understood as the justified or rightful exercise of political power — is central to “good government”: legitimate polities are more likely to enjoy the unforced compliance of their publics and to deliver high levels of economic performance.

PLATO was structured around fifteen early-stage researcher (ESR) projects examining the EU’s crisis responses across six institutional cases (horizontal and vertical contestation, new agencies, policy agreement) and nine democratic legitimacy dimensions (parliamentary representation, anti-corruption, non-domination, political trust, identities, civil society, acceptance of political competition, contestation in the public sphere, and elections). The IHS Vienna supervised two of the fifteen doctoral students.

The Vienna Institute for Advanced Studies was one of nine scientific partner institutions. Other partners included the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of Krakow, Sciences Po Paris, and the Universities of Antwerp, Cambridge, and Twente.