Representative Democracy in the European Union»

«Evolving dilemmas: representative democracy in the European Union» ****WORK IN PROGRESS – PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR SIRCULATE**** Guri Rosén1 Abstract In European Union (EU) studies, there has been what some call a ‘representative turn’ (cf. Kröger and Friedrich 2013). The particularities of the EU as a multilevel polity have spawned studies aiming to conceptualise and evaluate representation. Other analyses have revolved around the role of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and the extent to which their preferences and voting patterns are congruent with the EU electorate. Finally, there is work that seeks to appraise the responsiveness of EU parliamentarians, or the Union’s systemic responsiveness, by comparing public opinion to legislative output. The multilevel character of the EU presents distinct challenges to representation, however. We know for example that MEPs serve several principals, the party group they belong to at the EU-level, their national party (Hix 2002), their voters, perhaps even to the European integration project itself. What we know less about is how EU-parliamentarians adjudicate between these different commitments. Thus, the aim of this contribution is to analyse processes of representation within the EU, focusing on the interaction between the national and EU-levels. More specifically, it will gauge how MEPs’ representative roles are mediated by their national party, their EU-party group, their constituencies, as well as by their potential loyalty to the EU polity. It is argued that the European Parliament’s empowerment has made MEPs’ allegiances more unpredictable. As a result, representative practice becomes fragmented, putting further pressure on democracy both at the EU- and member state level. 1 Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet) and ARENA Centre for European Studies 1 Introduction The European Parliament is the directly elected parliament of the European Union (EU). Article 10 of Treaty on European Union states that “[t]he functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democracy”. The European Parliament (EP) is an experiment in democracy and an experiment in representative politics. Is democracy at the EU level possible or desirable (Majone 2005, Føllesdal and Hix 2006, Moravcsik 2002), and what is the role of the EP in the multilevel configuration of representation in the EU (Crum and Fossum 2009, Mair and Thomassen 2010, Kröger and Friedrich 2013)? To the study of representation, the EP is also intriguing because it “offers a fascinating research site for the investigation of important issues in the study of political representation” (Farrell and Scully 2010: 36). Much current research on representation within the EU has revolved around studying the role of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and their issue congruence with voters (e.g. Schmitt and Thomassen 1999, Arnold and Franklin 2012, Lefkofridi and Katsanidou 2014). While both groups of studies have provided ample evidence of the linkage between MEPs and EU citizens, they also provide a somewhat static image of the representative relationship between voters and MEPs. The study of representation in the context of the European Union is largely focused on elections, or what has been called the ‘product’, rather than the ‘process’ of representation (cf. Saward 2006). Rather than studying interaction between representatives and citizens, the primary goal has been to assess the results of elections by gauging the issue correspondence between MEPs and voters (de Wilde 2013: 282). Thus, the goal of this paper is to at the practice and process of representation. Rather than asking whether or how well MEPs are representing EU citizens – in some shape or form – the question is how they represent them. In answering this question, the paper builds on what has been termed the ‘constructivist turn’ in the study of representation, where representatives are seen as active in creating preferences and trying to shape public opinion according to their own beliefs and positions (Mansbridge 2003, Pollak and Castiglione 2018, Urbinati and Warren 2008). This ‘turn’ has shifted the focus from a bottom-up portrayal of representation to top-down processes of communication (Disch 2011: 103), and the active “constitution of constituency” (Saward 2006: 299). A key concept in this 2 literature is the ‘representative claim’, which can be defined as actors make claims to represent particular interests, in an attempt to construct or shape the representative relationship (Saward 2006, 2010). The question is: Are Members of the European Parliament making representative claims, and whom do they claim to represent? Following parts of the literature, one would not necessarily expect MEPs to be particularly active in attempting to shape the representative relationship with EU citizens. A prevalent view is that their link with voters is weak due to the way “EP elections (do not) work” (Hix et al. 2003: 194). Instead of responding to voter preferences, MEPs’ main principals are the national parties, who select the candidates in EP elections, and the supranational party groups, who control the internal affairs of the EP (Hix, 2002: 688). To study whether and how MEPs make representative claims, this paper analyses the engagement of MEPs in the debate about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the United States. Recent trade negotiations in the EU have provoked unprecedented levels of controversy (Young 2019). TTIP became particularly divisive, and is now put on ice. TTIP became a difficult issue for the EP. Political groups were internally divided, contestation become unexpectedly high, and public pressure grew throughout the talks. As elected representatives, MEPs should pay heed to the concerns of their voters, but at the same time the majority of members in the EP wanted to see the talks succeed and has encouraged member states to make a better effort at selling it to their respective citizens (European Parliament 2015). TTIP provides a good example of how MEPs have to navigate their roles as representatives between different interests. Trade policy also provides an interesting case to study EU-level representative behaviour, because it is an area where the EP has recently been empowered quite significantly (Rosén 2017). International trade is an issue where MEPs can claim ownership. Compared national parliamentarians, MEPs were in a favourable position both to monitor and impact the negotiations. Consequently, TTIP should be a good occasion for MEPs to demonstrate their importance. Lord (2018: 514) has claimed that what causes problems to the electoral link between MEPs and EU citizens is not one of institutional design, but of political community. This paper studies trade to see if an empowered policy area stimulates MEPs to attempt to establish that community, 3 through making representative claims. Applying this type of approach can be argued to be particularly important in party-centred systems because politicians also have to adhere to the party line (cf. Öhberg and Naurin 2016), and even more so in a multilevel polity such as the EU where MEPs have to adjudicate between their commitments to voters, national party as well as to their EP party group. Approaching representation in an EU context In EU-studies, there has been what some call a ‘representative turn’ (cf. Kröger and Friedrich 2013). The particularities of the EU as a multilevel polity have spawned studies aiming to conceptualise and evaluate representation beyond the nation state. The EU representative infrastructure has been termed a ‘multilevel parliamentary field’, where two channels of parliamentary representation are interlinked across levels, both which can claim to represent ‘the people’ in EU decision-making (Crum and Fossum 2009: 249). Some argue that the EU’s division of party representation and party government holds democratic potential (Mair and Thomassen 2010), while others have called the EP a working parliament without a public (Lord 2018). While the EP is directly elected since 1979, elections are widely held to be ‘second- order’ due to low turnout, campaigns being fought over national rather than European issues, and voters using the elections to punish the incumbent governments (Reif and Schmitt 1980, Schmitt 2005). This leads to the impression that EP-elections do not serve an apparent purpose (Franklin 2014). The ‘second-order’-hypothesis of European Parliament elections has dominated the literature on representation in the EU. With low turnout and national parties controlling the chances of re-election, Members of the European Parliament become less concerned with proving their worth to voters, and more with keeping their party colleagues reassured. Hix et al. (2007: 28) have argued that because MEPs lack the external motivation of re-election, “political behaviour in the European Parliament is primarily driven by considerations internal to the institution and the EU policy process”. The upshot is a lack of an electoral connection between the representatives in the EP and the electorate (Blondel, Sinnott and Svenson 1998, Eijk and Franklin 1996, Hix et al. 2007). A weak(er) electoral connection between MEPs and EU citizens does not exhaust the description of the representative relationship between them. Elections are not the only reason why parliamentarians represent. At the basis of the selection model of political 4 representation is the assumption that representatives and voters share interests, and that the

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