Representation and the European Union

This chapter considers the nature and quality of representation in the European Union by examining the dual paths of representation available to European citizens: the direct path of electing representatives to the European Parliament and the indirect path of electing national parliamentarians, and in turn governments, who represent national interests in the Council. Both paths matter if we want to understand representation in the European Union. The chapter examines the extent to which each of these channels facilitates substantive policy representation in the EU. It explores the quality of the selection and sanctioning processes in European Parliament and national elections, and examines citizens’ attitudes towards democracy at both levels of government. It concludes that, while representation in the EU is imperfect, it reflects the hybrid nature of the EU’s political system and is still undergoing significant change as the EU evolves and its policymaking is becoming more politicized domestically.

Mandate Versus Accountability

Electoral mandates and retrospective government accountability are two vital processes through which elections can connect the preferences and interests of citizens with the policies of representative governments. Large political science literatures explicate the complexities and limitations of each. An increasingly globalized international setting further complicates the tasks of both citizens and policymakers. However, in some contexts the two processes reinforce an equilibrium of responsive ideological correspondence, one element in good representation. This chapter discusses national contextual features, such as concentrated or dispersed policymaking power, and convergent or polarized party alternatives, that can induce them to coincide or collide.

Parliamentarians and Party Groups

Parliamentary democracies show little variance in party unity because the vast majority of parliamentarians vote in near perfect unity with their party on recorded votes. Legislative scholars are thus presented with a paradox: in those systems where party unity is most needed, it is the hardest to study. The focus of this chapter is on the elected representatives of the party, the party’s Members of Parliament (the parliamentary party group ). This chapter addresses the importance of party unity in parliamentary democracies, as well as the conceptual confusion surrounding party unity. It presents a new model for assessing party unity that begins to solve the puzzle of how to explore party unity when near perfect unity is recorded in parliamentary voting, and delineates the recent developments in research on party unity. It concludes by proposing an agenda for future research.

Gender Equality

The study of descriptive representation is key in projects that aim to understand and further gender equality. But what does it mean to achieve gender equality in descriptive representation? And how can descriptive equality be measured and understood? Gender and politics scholarship contends that gender equality is about more than counting women and men in elected assemblies. Concerns related to power, agency, and intersectionality should equally be addressed. This chapter engages with these challenges by going back to the conceptual roots of descriptive representation. Based on a re-reading of Pitkin’s foundational study on representation, it suggests that scholars can counter several of the complexities that have been identified by taking information-giving on board as an additional criterion. Studying descriptive representation as information-giving would allow for an improved understanding of the causes and consequences of political inequality, and of descriptive representatives as a source of equality in other political spheres.

Does Economic and Political Integration Undermine Representative Democracy?

The Great Recession and the Eurozone crisis are frequently treated as having led to a breakdown in democratic representation in Europe, as deeply constrained governments became unable to translate the preferences of citizenry into actual policy. However, after reviewing the available evidence, we find that the crisis seems to have contributed to increasing both the salience of economic policy issues and the ideological differentiation around them, amongst both parties and voters. Furthermore, the composition of governments remained relevant for the policy responses to the crisis, even among those countries that were most deeply affected. To be sure, the picture regarding the extent to which governments remained responsive to changing citizen preferences remains very incomplete. However, the existing evidence warns against underestimating the resilience of the mechanisms that contribute to keep re-election-minded officials in line with the preferences of citizens, even in what concerns supranational policymaking.

Globalization, Electoral Change, and Representation

Both the political consequences of market integration and the workings of representation in liberal democracies have received a good deal of attention. But if the contours of debates within these two research traditions are well defined, the linkages between them are not. This chapter takes a step towards establishing these connections. Organized about the chain of representation, this chapter makes three claims. First, that globalization is associated with changing social cleavages, and these changes are mainly in the realm of non-material, or cultural values. Second, that globalization matters for how voters decide by decoupling policy responsibility from elected representatives. And third, that globalization and economic crisis have reduced party and government responsiveness to public opinion.

Populists in Power

Much of the literature on populism, particularly in contemporary advanced democracies, focuses on its disruptive power to shake up mainstream party systems, to criticize the functioning of democratic institutions, and to mobilize critical citizens against elites. This chapter considers how populists construct regimes when they have established themselves in power, taking cases from post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe as examples. We identify specific governmental policies, ideological tenets, institutional designs, and discursive practices that enable populists to stabilize their rule and forge representational linkages with large blocks of the population. The chapter questions, however, whether the success of populists in power in these cases provides an indication of how populists might succeed in advanced democracies or whether it is a result of the peculiar political conditions of post-Communism, the absence of which suggests limiting conditions in other contexts.

The Cultural Pre-Requisites of Democracy

This chapter discusses the mentality structures that must be encultured in a population to allow it to sustain stable democracy. Contrary to the mainstream in the literature, I argue that mass support for democracy, as expressed in surveys, is a rather deceptive indicator of a population’s cultural affinity to democracy. The reason is that support for democracy obscures firmly encultured differences in how people understand democracy. These differences in understanding render numerically similar support ratings incomparable across different populations. By contrast, emancipative values—which emphasize freedom of choice and equality of opportunities—base people’s notion of democracy on a similarly liberal understanding of the term. Hence, overt support for democracy is conducive to actual democracy only in conjunction with emancipative values, but not in dissociation from them. In conclusion, emancipative values represent the most important mentality element of a democratic culture.

Feeling Represented

Institutional learning works. Citizens in older and more mature democracies feel represented to a larger extent than people in new and emerging democracies. And as normatively expected, feelings of being represented are reasonably well spread across different social and political groups. Electoral system design turns out not to be consequential. Majoritarian, proportional or mixed electoral systems do about equally well when it comes to how well people feel they are being represented by a party or a party leader. The results are based on data from The Comparative Study of Electoral System’s (CSES) project covering forty-six countries and eighty-six elections between 2001 and 2011.

Dynamic Representation

This chapter considers what we have learned—and still have to learn—from research on dynamic representation in the United States and other countries. To begin with, it provides a basic theoretical exposition and then traces the previous research, organized based on the dependent variables that the scholarship has employed: the priorities and positions of elected officials, legislative votes, and policy decisions. There is substantial evidence that changing public opinion matters for all of these but that the effect does not hold universally. Issues matter and institutions do too, and under the best of circumstances, the public is just one of many factors that matter to policymakers. Indeed, we sometimes observe little impact of public opinion at all, and this is in large part because of the public’s own inattention to policy actions themselves.