Customer Rating: 
Summary: raising the average
Comment: I don't normally write amazon reviews so this is partly just to counteract the incredibly misleading one-star review that is already there. That review, although clearly by a raving Euro-sceptic (as his/her reference to the Irish vote shows) may be giving out the wrong idea.
This book is an excellent analysis of the Eu's democratic/legitimacy deficit and addresses the fundemental problem that while the EU is procedurally very democratic (elected Council, elected Parliament, indirectly elected Commission), moreso than the UK, it lacks a 'European public' necessary to make these institutions work properly. He does not say that the system is perfect (far from it, hence the title 'what's wrong with the EU) and does not think the US system is perfect, just the only system that we can reasonably compare the EU to (although the EU is unique and thus comparisons don't work).
If Hix is pushing any agenda at all, it is to stop the EU being run by 'faceless Brussels bureaucrats', something surely everyone wants?!
This is an excellent book and as someone who did their Masters degree partly on European Union politics I found it incredibly useful both for the points it makes and the style used to make them which is eloquent and accessible.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Poor defence of the EU
Comment: Simon Hix is the Professor of European and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He chaired a working group for the Cabinet Office during the Convention drawing up the EU Constitution.
Hix sees three problems with the EU: policy gridlock, lack of popular legitimacy and the democratic deficit. He notes, In substantive terms the EU is closer to a form of enlightened despotism than a genuine democracy. Yet he calls its political design pure genius. He also thinks that the US has an ideal political-economic model, which gives some idea of his political nous.
In response to the EUs problems, he proposes to change the European Parliaments procedures for choosing its president and committee chairs, to make the Councils proceedings more open to the public, and to have a more open contest for the Commissions president. He explains patronisingly that through these reforms, citizens will begin to understand and engage with EU politics.
He also mentions that the EU is a driving force of global economic and political integration. He calls for the liberalisation of labour markets, welfare states, public services and energy industries, although he admits the downward pressures on public spending, corporate tax rates and wages that result from market integration and liberalisation. He notes, one group in society that has benefited enormously from European integration is the economic, political and social elite.
His proposed reforms completely ignore these economic realities, but these, not the EUs institutional failings, explain why public support for the EU has fallen since the early 1990s to just 50% across the EU and 30% in Britain.
Hix rejects the Lisbon Treaty, writing that the new treaty reforms are unlikely to bring the EU closer to the citizens, and may even undermine the legitimacy of the EU further if a second attempt to ratify a new treaty is rejected. And, even if the new treaty is ratified and eventually enters into force, the minor institutional changes are not significant enough to enable the EU to overcome policy gridlock or make the EU more democratically accountable. But his minor procedural changes would do no better.
Of course, like all EU fans, he opposes referendums, calling them a crude and ineffectual mechanism for expressing citizens preferences on policy issues. Hardly ineffectual - the Irish No to the Lisbon Treaty indeed undermined the legitimacy of the EU - in fact it has changed everything.
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