Electoral Democracy and Political Representation in the European Union

This paper addresses two particular aspects of the much debated democratic deficit in EU governance – the capacity of parties at the European level to represent the will of the citizens of Europe, and the absence of a system of party government at the European level, whereby parties in the parliament lack the capacity to effectively control the governing bodies of the EU. We first evaluate the debate on the effectiveness of the supranational national system of political representation. We take issue with the traditional view that the European process of political representation fails mainly because political parties do not compete on so called European issues. We argue that this view is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the role and function of both the European Parliament and the national parliaments. We find that despite a poor process of political representation at the European level, European elections and political parties do not really fail as instruments of political representation. We then go on to address the absence of an intimate relationship between the parties in parliament and the European ‘government’. An understandable reaction to this problem is often to recommend that the Union adapt to well known processes of representative government at the national level. Conventional solutions to this problem then seem fairly straightforward and involve combining representation with accountable government either through a full-blooded parliamentary system (the Commission becomes accountable to the EP) or through a full-blooded presidential system (the Head of the Commission becomes electorally accountable to the citizenry). Both involve variations of party government. We question the self evidence of this solution. The traditional systems of party government at the national level are no longer shining examples of effective and legitimate systems of representative government, and the conditions that facilitated the effective fusion of the functions of representation and of control of the government might well no longer pertain in contemporary democratic settings. In these circumstances, it might actually prove unwise to seek to replicate this process at the European level.