Political Representation in the European Union

Still democratic in times of crisis?

Sandra Kröger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138683532
• eBook ISBN: 9781317745488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years the financial and economic crisis of 2008–9 has progressed into an equally important political and democratic crisis of the EU. These troubled times have set the framework to re-assess a number of important questions in regard to representative democracy in the EU, such as the normative foundation of political representation, the institutional relationship between representatives and represented, the link between democracy and representation and new arenas and actors.

This book examines the diverse avenues through which different sorts of actors have expressed their voices during the Euro crisis and how their various interests are translated into the decision-making process. It offers a state-of- the-art assessment of what political representation means in this context as well as a contribution to the 'representative turn' in democratic theory. The authors address three key themes:

• The main actors and channels of political representation in the EU.

• Interlocking levels of representation in the EU and the way in which national and supranational representation works.

• How the European institutional system represents EU citizens through law and administration.

Focusing on the importance of representation in the legitimation of democracy, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of European Union politics, European studies, democratic theory, representation studies, civil society and transnational democracy.

Part I
Electoral forms of representation and the democratic crisis of the EU

1 Compounded representation in the EU

No country for old parliaments?

Johannes Pollak

Introduction

Political representation is not only a fuzzy concept; it is also an elusive activity. The higher the institutional complexity of a political system, the more elusive it becomes. While there is not much agreement amongst political scientists on what constitutes good representation there is an agreement that the institutional complexity of the European Union (EU) is a challenge for representative politics. There is also agreement that political representation is one of the key concepts of political science. As such it has undergone considerable changes from its invention in medieval times to the twenty-first century – changes which affected the conceptual dimension as well as the practical–institutional one. Thus, today we are debating new and innovative approaches such as Michael Saward’s model of representative claims (2010) as much as we are looking for new forms of representation, bypassing the trodden paths suggested by the all-too-simple standard model that is configured along the lines of the principal–agent format. The questions that representative theory has to answer, however, have remained remarkably stable: Who represents whom and how? What means do principals have to keep agency loss at bay?

This contribution understands democratic representation as ‘acting in the best interest of the represented’ (Eulau et al. 1959: 743; Pitkin 1967: 209; Przeworski et al. 1999: 2) by representatives subject to intensive public control. It is of less concern in this definition what kind of selection takes place – by lot, election, appointment – or how potential representatives construct their claims to representativeness. Rather, the focus is on how various agents ‘acting in the best interest’ can lead to a system that guarantees the central tenets of democracy.

What are those tenets?

1. All citizens must have the equal right to author their own laws either directly or through representatives in order to maximize the extent of public and private autonomy.
2. The public must be able to control the administration of laws, which is usually done through a chain of delegation in which their elected representatives form governments with controlling powers over the rest of the public administration (Strøm 2003).
3. A representative assembly must exist as the central place permitting ‘any one view to be justified or challenged in relation to any other’ (Mill 1972 [1861]).
4. All citizens must have the equal right to ‘form and change the conditions of their common life together, including democracy itself ’ (Bohman 2007: 66).
5. All citizens have the equal right to question the responsiveness of representatives and recall them via democratic processes (see Lord and Pollak 2010).

Different times and circumstances have given different institutional answers as to how to fulfil those conditions: from parliamentary to presidential democracies, from unitary to federal states, from proportional to first-past-the-post electoral systems, from checks-and-balances systems to horizontal or vertical separation of power systems, and so on. The EU has found an original answer by incrementally and probably also unintentionally developing a compounded system of representation, in which representatives of the same institution can be selected by different methods (e.g. the European Parliament (EP)), where we find different mandates (e.g. in the Council), and different territorial bases (Committee of the Regions) depending on national parliamentary scrutiny rights, political traditions, and state organization.

But what happens to this system if it comes under ever more strain from deepening supranational integration, globalized crises phenomena, and a decreasing trust in democracy’s problem-solving capacity? What happens if the congruence between voters, territory, and conceptions of political community breaks down? In order to answer these questions, the EU’s compounded system of representation in general, and the role of national parliaments therein in particular, will be addressed.

The contribution proceeds as follows. The second section looks briefly into theoretical developments contrasting the standard view of representation with representation as claims-making. The following section asks, from the perspective of parliamentarism, what specific form of representation has emerged at the European level and what its deficits are. The lack of parliamentary politics is recognized as the most disturbing element of European democracy. The third section charts the role of national parliaments in the EU and analyses whether the new parliamentary constellation of the Lisbon era increases the EU’s representative quality and thereby presents itself as a model to reconcile scope and representativity. The fourth section deals briefly with the impact of the financial crisis on parliamentary politics. A final section sums up the argument and concludes.

A challenge for theory and practice

The standard model describes the representative–represented relationship by pointing to four elements: first, territorially defined principals elect agents to stand and act for their interests, thereby separating the sources of legitimate democratic power from those that are beholden to exercise this power. Second, electoral representation identifies a space within which the sovereignty of the people is identified with state power. Third, some measure of responsiveness and accountability is ensured by electoral mechanisms. And finally, the universal franchise endows electoral representation with an important element of political equality (Urbinati and Warren 2008: 389), thereby guaranteeing some measure of self-government. Jennifer Mansbridge (2003, 2009) has called this model the promissory model of representation, or the sanctions model of representation. Arguably, the representative assembly occupies a central place in this understanding of representative democracy: it allows the citizens to fulfill the Kantian requirement of self-government without foregoing their private autonomy. In addition, the existence of a representative body also improves public autonomy to the extent citizens can enjoy greater public control where, instead of attempting the task themselves, they can appoint accountable representatives who are, in turn, specialized and skilled in bringing other power-holders to account for decisions concerning the ‘authoritative allocation of values’ (Easton 1953) in a polity. As Richard Bellamy (2008: 1) puts it: ‘in terms of democratic legitimacy, the system of representation offers a holistic framework within which to embed mechanisms of democratic authorization, control, and accountability.’

There are four generic reasons that make the standard account problematic. First, most of its elements are used in different contexts with various meanings and are theoretically underspecified. Neither is it clear what exactly is meant by authorization, social identity, or accountability, nor is it obvious how the various dimensions of representation work together and what the effects of their different combinations are (Pollak 2007). Thus, conceptual clarity is hard to find. Second, current political communities are remarkably different from the ones for which the standard account was developed – be it the rise of transnational decision arenas and actors, the rise of informal representation by interest groups, the stellar importance of state administrations, or perhaps the ever-decreasing turnout in Western democracies. The dominance of the nation state as the primary form of organizing liberal democracy is being increasingly challenged. Third, the boundaries of political communities have become increasingly fuzzy and porous. International (criminal) law and supranational law penetrate the autonomy of national (including constitutional) law to an extent that self-government becomes an elusive ideal. As a corollary of this porousness the size of political communities renders any direct social relationship between representatives and represented immensely difficult. Fourth, the core assumption of representative government, at least since Edmund Burke and Abbé Sieyès – that all other forms of representation and public decision-making in a polity can be subject to the ultimate regulation of a parliament elected from across the territorial unit as a whole – appears increasingly challenged by a wide range of actors claiming to be representative or claiming to be in a better position to judge the needs of the represented than elected representatives.

Recent developments in representative theory point on the one hand to the tremendously important aesthetic, constitutive factor in representation, and on the other hand criticize the reduction of a complex relationship between representative and represented to the electoral nexus. Political representation is very much about creating (Ankersmit 2002; Saward 2006, 2010) what is represented by condensing, generalizing, sharpening, inventing, and offering an image to an audience. What is represented is always just a fraction of what makes an audience. At the same time the representative is itself an artificial Leviathan, changing shape, form and colour with every angle or audience.¹ Moreover, manifold forms of representation beyond the electoral connection are emphasized, be they clad into deliberative, participative or associative forms of democracy. NGOs, interest groups, citizen initiatives, and so on, all claim their place at the table of political decision-making by pointing to their representativity. Those new theoretical developments reflect changes in the political landscape consisting of increasing deterritorialization, i.e. politics and economics are increasingly decoupled from a territory defining the realm of sovereignty. Moreover, they reflect an increasing heterarchization of politics itself taking place on multiple levels, involving state as well as non-state actors. The prime advantage of the representation as claims-making approach lies in overcoming the inflexibility of the standard account, which focuses on formal representation. Representation is no longer a status conferred upon elected officials: it is an activity open to everyone. As such it captures the rallying cry for more democracy, because everyone can now claim to represent something and demand a place at the decision-making table.² This demand is voiced increasingly by civil society groups, NGOs, INGOs, interest groups, and so on. But it is not only the heterarchization of politics or the increasing institutional complexity; it is also the remarkable reluctance of national representative institutions to adapt to a new political environment. In the face of supranational politics and the possibility of majority decisions, EU Member States insist on their sovereignty and uphold the fiction of national representative democracy. Because the national institutions of representation remained largely unbothered in the face of a dramatically changed political landscape, representative democracy no longer enjoys the undivided admiration it once did (Pollak 2007). An increasing gap between the way institutions are designed and their capacity to answer modern needs and demand is evident. On the one hand, this is reflected in a rising scepticism towards established institutions going hand in hand with a newly found penchant for direct democratic elements. On the other hand, this triggers questions about the adaptability of established institutions, and how they can be ‘made’ to fulfil their representative tasks.

The EU’s compounded system of representation

The EU was built by replicating – and in some cases duplicating – national institutions of representation. The result is tension between the scope of responsibility and the scope of representation. While national parliaments are viewed as a central arena of ‘public bavardage’, party competition and law-making their actual legislative influence on policy-making has shrunk considerably due to European integration (see Maurer 2008; Raunio 2010). They retain the former functions without enjoying the same legislative effectiveness. The hope that by replicating and duplicating or by lumping together existing representative institutions a new supranational representative system will emerge seems to be too optimistic. Thus, we need to ask how to reconcile traditional and new forms of representation with a widening scope of ‘representation needs’, reaching well beyond what national institutions are able to provide.

Allegations about the EU’s democratic deficit are usually met by referring to its complex institutional architecture and its three-tier representation structure. According to Article 10 TEU, EU citizens are directly represented at the Union level in the EP, Member States are represented in the European Council and in the Council, and all the institutions are called upon to maintain an open, transparent and regular dialogue with representative associations and civil society. Indeed, a system seems to be in place that puts executive actors under considerable constraint to refrain from intergovernmental bargaining or purely administrative policy-making via committees of experts. Instead, a complex and fine-tuned web requires balancing a wide range of interests and demands brought forward by a multitude of actors. This increases inclusiveness and promotes ideals of non-arbitrariness that emphasize a need to make decisions with the participation of the effected. The EU sports a system of representation that relies on a mixture of formal and informal representation, while further subdividing the delivery of both into processes that are partially autonomous of one another. Formal representation connotes those institutions or actors with a constitutionally recognized right to represent others in the making of authoritative, collective decisions of a polity. In contrast, informal forms derive from the attempts of groups in civil society to organize themselves for engagement with a polity. They portray themselves as representatives of sometimes very broad membership structures – such as consumer groups or environmental organizations – and therefore claim a place in the collective decision-making process. Crucially, informal representatives do not just lack the authority to speak on behalf of the whole citizenry; they do not seek that authority, preferring, instead, to give voice and influence to specific membership groups. This sets them significantly apart from formally elected representatives, who in order to maximize the common ground of decision-making, whether to minimize transaction costs or to optimize votes, have to present fairly general representative claims (Lord and Pollak 2010). Indeed the mixture between formal and informal representation seems to be a characteristic of the EU’s representative system expressed in a highly complex, consensus-oriented institutional set-up.

While this complex and compounded system theoretically does justice to the multitude of interests in modern societies it is by no means obvious that this results in democratic, fair and equal representation. Several indeterminacies pertaining to the executive and the parliamentary dimensions of the EU have to be considered:

1. When it comes to the representation of Member States in the European Council, which has a far greater influence than the Treaties confer, differences in economic weight result in inequality. Again and again commentators deplore the dwindling driving force of the Franco–German axis. Seen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: the search for democratic representation in times of crisis
• PART I Electoral forms of representation and the democratic crisis of the EU
• PART II Non-electoral forms of representation in multi-level representation in times of crisis
• PART III Concluding essays
• Index