Could the Lisbon Treaty bring the EU and its institutions closer towards democracy and reduce the democratic deficit?

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,0, , course: European Integration, language: English, abstract: The main purpose of this paper is to look at the democratic deficit from different perspectives and find out if the last treaty of the EU, the Lisbon Treaty, could bring the EU and its institutions closer towards democracy and eliminate or at least reduce the democratic deficit. In order to do so, first an attempt is made to define democratic deficit going to its roots and first implementation relating to the EU. Second, different debates and opinions about the democratic deficit, its existence or absence will be presented in the second chapter of this seminar paper. Opinions of the most prominent scholars in this field such as Moravcsik, Majone and Hix, whose contribution to democratic discussions was enormous in the last decade will be thoroughly analyzed. The part involving opinions of Moravcsik and Majone of this chapter is the longest one based on an assumption that in our everyday life we often hear arguments in support of the existence of democratic deficit. It was important to show another perspective on this issue as not enough attention is drawn to assess democratic deficit from the point of its non-existence. Further opinions of scholars who agree with existence of democratic problems will be presented, whereas there will be many wanted correlations with Moravcsik and Majone to give a complete overview over the issue. After defining and presenting different perspectives on democracy and democratic deficit I will continue talking about contributions made by the Lisbon Treaty to democracy as well as main reforms and opportunities for further development of the EU.