Democracy in the European Union: The Problem of Political Capacity

always been concerned with the performance of democracies, which he sees as an eminently political matter, deeply conditioned by the quality of partisan political competition, but also dependent on the institutional structures superintending governance. His most famous works examine the effects of governmental structures on the extent to which party competition conditions public policies. By and large, he finds that partisan effects are more pronounced in majoritarian forms of democracy, thereby enhancing lines of accountability to the electorate, but that non-majoritarian forms have other advantages, for instance, for ensuring social cohesion and political stability (cf. Lijphart 1999; Armingeon 2002). Marked by scrupulous empirical research and discerning theoretical insights, Schmidt's work sheds light on important questions about the institutional prerequisites for effective democracy In this essay, I take up some of these questions at a level above the nation-state, namely, in the contemporary European Union, with an emphasis on the political dimensions of democracy inspired by Schmidt's writing. The European Union (EU) is now a crucial component of governance in Europe. With wide powers over trade and economic regulation, especially among the seventeen member states that share a common currency, and growing authority over justice and social affairs, its shadow looms large over many fields of policy-making. Even when the EU has not adopted an official policy, the prospect it might do so can influence national initiatives, and national policy-making has changed in many spheres to accommodate the need to negotiate new regulations with other member states. In many cases, the effect has been to shift the locus of power over policy away from departments and the domestic constituencies to whom they normally respond, toward ministerial cabinets and inter-ministerial committees that can coordinate negotiations across policy areas at the EU level (Smith 2004). Europe has acquired a novel system of multi-level governance that is dramatically altering the ways in which policies are made (Hooghe and Marks 2001). Is this a sufficiently democratic system of governance? Has the development of the EU enhanced or eroded the quality of democracy in Europe? These questions have elicited deep controversy among academic analysts and the citizens of Europe. Like many other scholars, Schmidt has noted (in 2002c: 158) that " the structural democratic deficit of transnational policy making in the European Union…is a major unsolved problem for all member states… " After efforts to secure a similar constitution for the EU failed, the Treaty of …