Democracy In Europe ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Democracy In Europe is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Democracy in Europe is a contested concept. It divides those who argue that the European Union (EU) has a democratic deficit from those who argue the contrary and divides those who would remedy the deficit through greater politicization from those who would not. Underpinning these divisions are different understandings of what democracy in the EU is or should be and how much it can be improved.

Politics Of The Eu

The EU’s democratic institutions have much in common with national federal systems. They are characterized by a horizontal separation of powers, making for checks and balances among EU-level authorities, and a vertical division of powers between the EU and its member states, making for multilevel governance. However, unlike in federal systems, the national-level periphery has more power than the EU-level center, given member-state control of legislation. Legislation is approved by member-state executives in the Council of Ministers and by member-state representatives in the European Parliament (EP) and implemented by national bureaucracies. However, the council and parliament are weak because of the EU Commission’s role in legislative initiative and enforcement. Finally, while only the European Court of Justice has the power typical of supreme judicial courts in a federal system, it is arguably more independent, given EU rules that make it very difficult for council member states to overturn European Court of Justice judgments.

While EU institutions bear some resemblance to national ones, EU politics does not. The EU lacks a directly elected president or parliament-elected prime minister, a strong legislature, and vigorous political parties in a region-wide competitive, partisan electoral system. Instead, it has indirect representation by nationally elected executives in the Council of Ministers and the European Council, which is headed by a six-month rotating president. However, once the Lisbon Treaty went into effect, although the rotating presidency continued, the council president was appointed by the council to serve a two-and-a-half-year term that is renewable once, and a high representative was appointed as the equivalent of a foreign minister. Only the EP provides for direct representation; however, it is much weaker than any parliamentary democracy. It has no say over the appointment of the council president and has approval powers only over the appointment of the commission president. Its elections, which are organized within rather than across member states, are also second order, given the greater focus on national rather than European issues.

Most important, EU politics is not really politics in any traditional sense of party and partisanship because it is mainly about interests, whether the national interests projected by the member states in the council, the public interests defended by national representatives in the EP, or the organized interests mediated by the commission as well as, increasingly, by the EP. Partisan politics is marginalized in this pluralist, interest-based system for a variety of reasons. Political parties at the European level are weak and not very cohesive, although this has been changing in recent years. The commission’s consensus oriented, technical approach to policy initiation and development avoids left-right divides. And issues voted by the EP in codecision procedures with the council are decided mostly by supermajorities in the EP. The result is that policy making at the EU level can be characterized as policy without politics. This, in turn, leads to politics without policy at the national level as more policies are moved to the EU level even as politics continues primarily at the national level. This leaves an impoverished national political arena in which citizens feel increasingly disenfranchised because, as voters, they have voice over questions that do not count at the level at which they voice them. Nevertheless, the EU remains a sleeping giant for the moment with regard to EU-generated splits in national party politics despite the fact that some of these problems have been apparent during treaty referenda. These referenda have increasingly mobilized dissatisfied constituencies on the right and left, which helps explain the French and Dutch rejection of the Constitutional Treaty and the Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty.

The Legitimacy Of The Eu

As a result of this wide range of political issues, the majority of EU scholars argue that the EU suffers from a democratic deficit. Only a few scholars defend the EU as already democratic enough. Majone (1998) argues that as a “regulatory state,” the EU’s legitimacy is based on the delegated responsibility of its “expertocracy.” Moravcsik (2002) adds that the EU is no worse than other democracies, with legitimacy ensured through its checks and balances and delegated authorities. The problem with this emphasis on “output” democracy through governing effectiveness, as Scharpf ’s (1999) arguments suggest, is that it fails to deal with the “input” democracy expectations of citizens through representative democracy. Schmidt (2006) takes this point further by showing that unlike nation-states’ mature democracies that have a full range of democratic legitimizing mechanisms, the EU has a fragmented democracy, split between “output” governing effectiveness for the people and interest consultation with the people at the EU level and “input” political participation by the people and citizen representation of the people at the national level.

Many scholars see the main solution to the EU’s democratic deficit in the development of EU-level institutions that are more participatory and representative, but some argue they also need to be more redistributive. The EU itself has sought to increase its transparency and accountability and to do more to bring civil society into the policy-making process. The EU’s ill-fated initiative on a constitutional treaty during the constitutional convention has been generally hailed as one of the first instances of deliberative democracy in the EU.

Some scholars argue that the EU needs to be politicized further to solve the democratic deficit, for example, by having the EP elect the commission president, hold EU-wide elections on the same day, and schedule transnational policy forums on issues of general concern. Others worry that it is too soon for any such politicization given the lack of a collective will in the EU or of a European public sphere. However, the main concern is that politicizing EU institutions will undermine the EU’s ability to deliver policies efficiently and effectively. The problem is threefold: how does one maintain the effectiveness of the EU’s output democracy for the people if one increases input democracy by and of the people at the EU level, since this would politicize decisions that were efficiently dealt with as technocratic in the past? By the same token, if one does not increase the input side through politicization, how does one respond to citizens’ dissatisfaction with the lack of political debate about contested policy decisions? Yet if one does increase input democracy at the EU level, can one do this without undermining it at the national level? Any recommendations for the politicization of the EU have to face up to these questions and to the real limits to EU democratization today.

Bibliography:

Greven, Michael. “Can the European Union Finally Become a Democracy?” In Democracy beyond the State? The European Dilemma and the Emerging Global Order, edited by Michael Greven and L.W. Pauly. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
Hix, Simon. What’s Wrong with the European Union and How to Fix It. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008.
Magnette, Paul. “European Governance and Civic Participation: Beyond Elitist Citizenship?” Political Studies 51 (2003): 144–160.
Mair, Peter. “The Limited Impact of Europe on National Party Systems.” In Europeanised Politics? European Integration and National Political Systems, edited by Klaus Goetz and Simon Hix. London: Frank Cass, 2001.
Majone, Giandomenico. “Europe’s Democratic Deficit.” European Law Journal 4, no. 1 (1998): 5–28.
Moravcsik, Andrew. “Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union.” Journal of Common Market Studies 40, no. 4 (2002): 603–624.
Reif, Karl-Heinz, and H. Schmitt. “Nine Second-order National Elections: A Conceptual Framework or the Analysis of European Election Results.” European Journal of Political Research 8 (1980): 3–44.
Scharpf, Fritz W. Governing in Europe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Schmidt,Vivien A. Democracy in Europe:The EU and National Polities. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Schmitter, Philippe C. How to Democratize the European Union and Why Bother. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
van der Eijk, C., and M. Franklin. “Potential for Contestation on European Matters at National Elections in Europe.” In European Integration and Political Conflict, edited by Gary Marks and Marco R. Steenbergen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Weiler, Joseph H. H. The Constitution of Europe: “Do the New Clothes Have an Emperor?” and Other Essays on European Integration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.