In response to my post earlier this week regarding the lack of accountability of the European Parliament, David Schleicher of the George Mason School of Law alterted me to a paper of his entitled What If Europe Held an Election and No One Cared? Here’s the abstract:
Last June’s European Parliament (EP) election was widely recognized to be a failure. Turnout was low across Europe and, as has been the case in each and every EP election since they were introduced in 1979, voters responded exclusively to domestic cues in deciding how to fill the European Union’s only directly-elected body. Campaigns were waged entirely on domestic issues outside of the purview of the EP and the popularity of domestic Prime Ministers, who were not on the ballot, was the most important factor in determining the results. The EP is supposed to provide a popular check on the other legislative bodies in the European Union (EU), which are either appointed or controlled directly by Member State governments, and hence reduce the EU’s “democratic deficit.” Instead, the failure of EP elections to generate popular feedback on EU policy allows the deficit to fester and undermines the EU’s separation of powers.
This paper argues that the problem of EP elections is much like problems in a variety of American state and local elections. Election laws ensure that national parties are on the ballot, and both legal limitations and strategic considerations make it difficult for major parties to develop separate localized identities, or in the case of EP elections, Europeanized ones. Rationally ignorant voters who know little about the individual figures in these bodies rely on the party heuristic that is available on the ballot, as it is the only relevant information they have, and do so even though it is unclear how closely preferences on European or local policies track preferences about national issues. The result is that national party preference ends up being reflected in these elections, despite the fact that winners will decide policies at another level of government. Put another way, there is a “mismatch” between the institutional role the EP is asked to play in the EU’s separation of powers – the voice of European citizens about European Union policies – and the level of party competition at which EP elections are contested.
Mismatch problems are endemic in federal systems and are generated by the interaction of constitutional theory about how democratic institutions should function and the actual practices of voters. However, mismatch problems can be solved or at least mitigated with election law tools. Following a procedure used in a variety of developing countries, the EU could pass a law that the EP will only seat members from those parties that both won seats from a given EU country and received a certain percentage of the vote in a quarter of EU Member States. This would force the coalitions formed in the EP - the so-called “Euro-parties” – onto EP ballots, as parties would need to contest elections across Europe. Voters thus would have access to a European, rather than national, heuristic on the EP ballot, which would better allow them to use these elections to express preferences about EU policy.
The full paper can be dowloaded here (although David notes that an updated version will be available shortly) and is forthcoming in the Harvard International Law Journal.
Let me offer a couple quick comments as well. First, I very much like the link between US elections and European elections. Europeans sometimes seem to have a “sky is falling” reaction to low turnout rates, and there is a lot that can be learned from comparing turnout in the US and Europe. Alex Pacek, Grigore Pop-Eleches, and I have a recent Journal of Politics aritcle on turnout in post-communist countries that makes a similar point. We find that turnout in “dominated” elections (that is for a president in a parliamentary system or a parliament in a presidential system) is on average about 10% points lower as in elections for “dominant” institutions (presidents in presidential systems and parliaments in parliamentary systems), which should not come as much of a surprise given our knowledge of how turnout is always lower in the US in off year Congressional elections as opposed to Presidential elecitons.
Second, I find the suggested solution of forcing the Euro-factions to actually compete as such in EU Parliamentary elections very interesting. On the one hand, it should serve the purpose of moving EU Parliamentary elections away from being 2nd order national elections. On the other hand, one could imagine that an election featuring pan-European parties would attract even less interest from voters than EU parliamentary elections already do. And if the reason that the most recent EU parliamentary elections were a “failure” was because of low turnout, moving competition away from national parties to pan-European parties might only exacerbate this problem.
{ 3 comments }
Perhaps voter indifference to European Parliament elections is rational. The European Parliament has little political power, since nearly all power is held by unelected bodies. In particular, only the European Commission has legislative initiative in the EU. Hence, perhaps the way to get voters more interested in EP elections is to give the EP more power, and eliminate the undemocratic powers enjoyed by unelected bodies in the EU.
I think the real problem is that nobody in Europe actually believe that the power in the EU lies in the European Parliament and that the Parliament elections will affect their lives all that much. At the very least, people have a fuzzy idea about what the Parliament actually does. It’s the Commission and the Council that seems to be holding the reins.
With a fuzzy idea about the parliament in the first place, I can’t see why replacing the parties people actually know and have a relationship with should make things any better. If anything it could serve to make the alienation of the (non-)voters complete.
Good point about the low turnout in American elections. And this does seem to be a problem with large federal entities, maybe to some extent in India and Brazil as well.
I’ve thought of a few remedies to this problem. The Europeans could go back to the days, early in the history of the European Parliament, when that body was made up of delegations from the national parliaments. The one difference is that the delegations should be of actual serving members of the national parliaments, who would rotate in and out of Brussels (annual stints) to debate issues and monitor the Commission. Any votes that are now taken by the European Parliament would be sent to the national parliaments, with the delegations returning to explain what the issues were. In effect, the European Parliament would duplicate exactly the Council of Ministers, at the legislative level.
This way there would be no elections to the European Parliament at all, but when you voted for the national Parliament you in effect voted for the European Parliament too. And it would end alot of the current bellyaching about federalism.
The opposite approach would be to turn the European Parliament into a real parliament, with one method of election across the EU (probably the additional member system) and powers more appropriate to a legislature, including replacing both the Commission and the Council of Ministers with an executive drawn from, and responsible to, the European Parliament. Then you would see increased turnout in European Parliament elections and lower turnout in national elections.
At the moment the institution is neither here nor there.
Comments on this entry are closed.