Making Representative Democracy Work: The Role of Parliamentary Administrations in the European Union

The article introduces the special issue on ‘Administering Representative Democracy. The European Experience of Parliamentary Administrations in Comparative Perspective’, explaining how it seeks to make a major addition to the study of parliaments as well as of public administration. It specifically aims at demonstrating that parliamentary bureaucracies are ‘silent’ organisations playing a fundamentally serving function, and yet they offer a crucial contribution to the well-functioning of representative assemblies. It explores the distinctive nature of this subject matter in Europe, and in this way ties into the wider debates about the functioning of representative democracy