Party Politics and Democracy in Europe

Essays in honour of Peter Mair

Ferdinand Muller-Rommel, Fernando Casal Bértoa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317627067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited collection, in honour of the late political scientist Peter Mair, contains original chapters that are directly linked to his theoretical and/or methodological ideas and approaches.

Peter Mair demonstrated that political parties have traditionally been central actors in European politics and an essential focus of comparative European political science. Though the nature of political parties and the manner in which they operate has been subject to significant change in recent decades, parties remain a crucial factor in the working of European liberal democracies. This volume analyses recent developments and current challenges that European parties, party systems and democracy face.

The volume will be of key interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, democracy studies, political parties, and European politics and European Union studies.

Part III
European Union

9 Representing without governing

Jorge Fernandes and David M. Willumsen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315755403-12

Introduction

In some of his later work, Peter Mair devoted significant attention to the challenges facing European democracies (Mair 2008, 2013), particularly the effects of developments in the European Union (Mair 2000, 2007). Mair’s arguments were based on the fading of party government, with the ever-growing difficulties of political parties in faithfully representing the interests of their electorate. Mair and Thomassen (2010) made the bold claim that, in contrast to national representatives, who have to perform the dual role of representing and governing at the same time, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have the potential to fulfil the representative role better than members of national parliaments (MPs), since MEPs are freed from the governing function. However, this argument rests on two unstated assumptions: first, that MEPs want to represent their voters and, second, that the policy preferences of MEPs and voters are sufficiently similar to make representation meaningful.

In this chapter we make an empirical appraisal of the extent to which Mair and Thomassen’s argument about representation at the European Union (EU) level can succeed. More precisely, this chapter is structured as follows: we first outline the problem of representation in national and EU politics. Second, we discuss how to test for the feasibility of representation at the EU level and introduce the data used for this. Finally, we analyze the representational foci of MEPs and the ideological overlap between voters, MEPs and national MPs.

The problem with party government in the European Union

Mair and Thomassen (2010) articulate an interesting argument about the conditions under which party government at the EU level can actually benefit the quality of representation. The authors claim that because political parties are freed from governing at the European level, they have an enhanced capacity for representation. In following paragraphs, we discuss Mair and Thomassen’s counterintuitive argument and link it to Mair’s work on the challenges to representation in liberal democracies.

Contemporary democracies are inherently representative, in that citizens delegate power to elected officials through electoral mechanisms. Free and fair elections are instruments of democracy in the hands of the citizenry, not only to choose who governs but also to keep the government accountable (Powell 2000). Delegation and accountability are part of a broader concept of representation, defined as ‘acting in the interest of the represented in a manner responsive to them’ (Pitkin 1967: 209). Political parties have played a pivotal role in building representative democracy. As Schattschneider (1942: 1) famously put it, ‘political parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of political parties’. Since the advent of mass politics at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the extension of the suffrage to a large majority of the (male) population, the transaction costs of decision making became too great to be dealt with using direct democracy (Dahl 1998). Political parties are the institutional answer to the collective action problem of aggregating and organizing political offers in a structured and low-cost way (Dalton and Wattenberg 2002).

In European parliamentary democracies, the ‘responsible party government’ model thrived side by side with the success of mass parties, with party system structures shadowing the cleavage structures on the ground (Mair 1997). Mair (2008) discussed the conditions for party government, summarizing them as a sequence of events that allow citizens to choose from structured governing alternatives (see also Miller and Stokes 1963, Sartori 1968). First, cohesive political parties offer the electorate clear policy alternatives. Second, voters make both a retrospective evaluation of party performance, as well as a prospective evaluation based on the manifestos parties present. Subsequently, free and fair elections allow voters to choose the party (or parties) that will control the executive. Finally, Mair notes that, in the responsible party government model, public policy should be determined by the party in the executive.

The conditions summarized above have been successful in national polities across Europe for most of the twentieth century. Turning to the EU, there has been a profusion of accounts about the so-called democratic deficit which hinders the capacity of voters to determine public policy in the EU (Follesdal and Hix 2006). In comparing the national and the supranational levels, Mair and Thomassen (2010) looked at the functions that political parties fulfil, which equates to looking at the mechanism that lies at the heart at representative democracy and, ultimately, creates party government under the conditions outlined previously.

Mair and Thomassen (2010) argue that, at national level, political parties perform a dual role. On the one hand, parties have an expressive role, where they act as representatives of the voters to the state. In this sense, MPs act as delegates of societal interests to state institutions. On the other hand, parties have a governing role, whereby they organize executive power and coalesce to form cohesive blocs that allow for stable governing arrangements. At the national level, the argument goes, there is a fusion of the expressive and the governing functions, allowing for the creation of clear-cut governing alternatives, in which voters have a fairly good understanding of where their representatives stand on the most important issues. To put it another way, the expressive function feeds the governing function with policy inputs, hence permitting an alignment between the two functions.

At the European level governing arrangements are very different. The expressive and governing functions are separate in that they have separate origins and legitimacy. The expressive function is fulfilled by the European Parliament, the only directly elected EU institution. Since the first direct European Parliament elections in 1979, the powers of the Parliament have grown extensively, an argument used regularly to underline its importance and to show how it mitigates the so-called democratic deficit (Follesdal and Hix 2006). At the European level, the governing function has a much more blurred origin because it comes from a mixture of intergovernmental arrangements. National governments make up the European Council and the Council of Ministers, as well as nominating the Commission members. These institutions can be understood as being another link in the chain of democratic delegation in that voters choose, via parliaments, their national governments and the latter in return represent them in the Council and in the selection of Commissioners.

In contrast to national parliamentary democracies, in which the executive originates in and depends on the legislature, the origin and survival of the EU’s executive, the Commission, is only partly dependent on the legislative branch. ¹ Consequently, the elections to the European Parliament are second-order elections (see, for example, Hix and Marsh 2007, 2011, Reif and Schmitt 1980), with relatively low turnout, partly due to the relative weakness of the European parliament when compared to national parliaments, and partly, as Mair (2007: 8) argues, due to European elites having purposely chosen to depoliticize European issues to have their hands freed from ‘the constraints of popular democracy’.

The novelty introduced by Mair in some of his later work (Mair and Thomassen 2010, Mair 2008, 2013) is that representation at national and supranational levels is becoming increasingly similar. From a normative perspective, the interesting point about Mair’s argument is that this approach is driven by the waning of party government at the national level. It is not that the EU is becoming more responsive to citizens and closer to the party government ideal-type but rather that national polities are losing some of the defining qualities that used to underpin party government. Mair argues that parties have cut their ties with society and their members by relying on state resources, particularly for funding (Katz and Mair 1995). Consequently, the cartelization of political parties has led to a disentangling of the expressive and governing functions at the national level. Parties still govern but the way they govern is increasingly distant from the interests they represent. The linkage that allowed the expressive function to provide input to the governing function is broken, reducing the quality of democratic government.

This contrasts with representation at the EU level. Since they do not need to govern, ‘parties at the European level may be able to provide a more robust channel of representation than that currently on offer within the democratic polities of the member states’ (Mair and Thomassen 2010: 27). Fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Party Politics and Democracy in Europe
• 1Comparative and national politics
• 2Political parties and party systems
• 3European Union
• 4(The future) of party democracy
• Index