The European Union democratic deficit: Substantive representation in the European Parliament at the input stage
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116517741562 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Author | Miriam Sorace |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The European Union
democratic deficit:
Substantive representation
in the European
Parliament at the
input stage
Miriam Sorace
European Institute, London School of Economics and Political
Science, London, UK
Abstract
The analysis compares voters’ preferences in economic policy to political parties’ eco-
nomic written parliamentary questions during the 2009–2014 term of the European
Parliament. The corpus of over 55,000 written questions was ideologically scaled via
crowdsourcing. The analysis shows that parties are unresponsive to second-order and
to disengaged voters. The results also suggest that there is no upper class bias in
European Parliament political representation. The data highlight a strong tendency of
EP7 political parties to cluster around the position of the average Europeanvoter, at the
expense of their average supporter. The democratic deficit is therefore at most a
pluralism deficit in the European Parliament, since substantive representation in the
European Parliament is successful as far as the majoritarian norm is concerned.
Keywords
Crowdsourcing, democratic deficits, European Parliament, European Union, political
representation
Introduction
Forty-seven per cent of Europeans surveyed in the 2014 European Election Stu dy
believed the European Parliament (EP) did not represent their preferences, and 44%
European Union Politics
2018, Vol. 19(1) 3–24
!The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116517741562
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Corresponding author:
Miriam Sorace, European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street,
London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: m.sorace@lse.ac.uk
claimed not to trust the institutions of the European Union (Schmitt e t al., 2015).
Popular support for the European Union has decreased since the 19 90s, when the age
of ‘permissive consensus’ ended, following the establis hment of the internal market
(Hix 2008). On top of this, on 23 June 2016 British voters decided that the UK should
exit the EU, amid, among other things, perceptions of not being repre sented by EU
policymakers. UK voters are determined to ‘take back control’ from a distant and
unrepresentative European polity, as maintained by the Leave campaig ners.
Far from being confined to Euro-sceptic rhetoric, concerns about the EU demo-
cratic deficit first appeared in academic circles (Leconte, 2010). The academic cri-
tiques levelled at the EU fall into six general categories: (1) the EU has an opaque
institutional design and ends up being dominated by technocrats, (2) the EU has
led to ‘deparliamentarisation’, (3) the EP does not have sufficient influence, (4)
there is no European ‘demos’ and hence no European democracy is possible, (5)
EU elections are ‘second-order’: they do not convey sufficient information to
European voters or make it possible to hold legislators to account and (6) the
EU does not represent its citizens because of its pro-capital bias. The aim of this
article is to investigate the latter academic democratic deficit hypotheses by using
legislative activities of the EP as a case.
Assessing political acts against voters’ political preferences is the essential test of
democracy (Gilens, 2005; May, 1978; Pitkin, 1967), and yet – though the notion
that the EU is not democratic is voiced by Euro-sceptics and academics alike – not
many studies examine the adherence to the ‘responsive rule’ by representatives
serving in EU institutions. The existing scholarship on the health of EU political
representation overly relies on ‘formalistic representation’ (Pitkin, 1967), since it
tests the quality of the ‘authorisation’ process by examining the match between
voters’ attitudes and representatives attitudes or promises at election time (Belchior,
2013; Costello et al., 2012; Dalton, 2015; Vasilopoulou and Gattermann, 2013;
Walczak and Van der Brug, 2013). Existing research that looks at ‘substantive’
representation (the match between voter attitudes and representative behaviours)
does not place EU legislation on the left–right spectrum. This literature tests sub-
stantive representation of Euro-scepticism, not of voters’ left–right preferences
(Arnold et al., 2013; Hagemann et al., 2016; Toshkov, 2011).
No studies to date examine the left–right behaviours of EU representatives
against the left–right preferences of citizens. Behavioural congruence is different
from ideological or attitudinal congruence, and it is closer to Pitkin’s conceptual-
isation of political representation as ‘substantive’ or ‘acting for’ representation
(Eulau and Karps, 1977). Substantive representation is a synonym of responsiveness
(Eulau and Karps, 1977; May, 1978), even though more recent empirical
scholarship restricts the concept of responsiveness to time series designs.
Behavioural congruence indicates the congruence between voters’ left–right atti-
tudes with parties’ left–right statements during their decision-making activities and is
here a synonym for substantive representation.
This article investigates the role of voters’ characteristics for political represen-
tation in the EP. In particular, the analysis focuses on the role of second-order
4European Union Politics 19(1)
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