Testing Europe’s Representative Democracy in the Covid-19 Crisis

Abstract

The European Union’s evolution is often analysed through the prism of successive crises. The crisis spurred by the Covid-19 pandemia is seen as trigger for yet another step in the EU’s macro-economic integration. Beyond such ‘history making decisions’, however, crises are before all tests for the resilience of representative democratic institutions in the European Union, in particular the EU’s evolving parliamentary institutions. The Covid-19 crisis and its economic consequences have put the EU’s and the member states’ political institutions under pressure. They have altered public support for member state policies during the crisis, creating stronger support for the executives in some member states but increasing also democratic regime contestation against curbs of civil liberties. At the same time the pandemia has enhanced public attention to and expectations directed at the European Union as a transnational problem-solving arena, in particular concerning the economic effects of the crisis, but also the coordination of health policy instruments for example. The EU’s quality as an actor has both been affirmed and contested in narratives about potential collective policy-solutions for the crisis. Parliamentary institutions in the EU supposed to represent European citizens had to cope with two mutually reinforcing problems during the Covid-19 crisis. On the one hand they had to cope with a crisis which enhanced executive powers in the short-term and on the other the pandemic itself impeded on normal parliamentary procedures. The European Parliament had to negotiate the multi-annual financial framework and the EU recovery fund under the conditions of mostly virtual working modes. National parliaments in some member states have even been temporarily closed. National parliaments have nevertheless tried to follow closely the negotiations in the European Council about burden-sharing of the effects of the Corona-crisis. This panel is an occasion to bring together research on the state of representative democracy in the European Union during the Covid-19 pandemia, which tested the resilience of the EU’s representative democracy. Papers will ask which effects the Covid-19 crisis had on the input side of EU and European politics, asking how the EU was perceived and narrated as an actor during the crisis and how democratic regime support was altered through the first wave of the pandemia. It will ask how resilient the EU’s representative institutions were for crisis management and how MPs and MEPs have dealt with and (de)legitimated EU crisis response instruments.

Title	Details
The EU and Covid-19 – A Comparative Frame Analysis of the European Union During the First Wave of the Covid-19 Crisis	View Paper Details
Democracy in Lockdown: What Role for the European Parliament in the Covid-19 Crisis?	View Paper Details
Covid-19, the Eurozone Crisis and Parliamentary Democracy in the EU ? Economic Solidarity and Democratic Legitimacy in Domestic Parliamentary Debates on EU Crisis Resolution Instruments	View Paper Details
What Remains of Populism in the Covid-19 Crisis? EU and National Performance in the Anti-Elitism-Conspiracy Nexus	View Paper Details