Parliaments, citizens and the Future of Europe: synergies or legitimacy clashes ?

Abstract

Well functioning channels of representative and participatory democracy are essential pillars of the European Union (EU)’s input legitimacy and it is of strategic importance to reconnect these two dimensions to remedy the EU’s democratic deficit. In this context, the recently concluded Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) - a transnational experiment of direct democracy based on a series of consultations with European citizens which took place between 2021 and 2022 - provides a fertile ground to study the relationship between EU parliaments and citizens at a time when the Union has to deal with multiple internal and external challenges. The institutional design of the CoFoE - consisting of a Plenary composed of 108 EU citizens, 108 Members of the European Parliament (EP) and 108 national parliamentarians as well as 9 thematic working groups including the same categories of actors - serves as an excellent test-case for assessing the intermediary role of national parliaments; their ownership of the EU integration process, responsiveness towards citizens’ EU-oriented preferences and relations with the EP. At the end of the day, any Member States’ decisions on EU reforms and potential treaty changes as a result of the CoFoE require the support of domestic parliamentary majorities. Against this background, the underlying goal of this panel is to provide conceptual and empirical contribution to the discussion about the interplay between parliamentary and direct democracy in the EU by analysing to what extent, how and why domestic parliaments have responded to the process of the CoFoE as well as its ongoing follow-up. The panels gather interdisciplinary papers, representing both political science and law, which address the above-mentioned query from the point of view of parliaments as collective institutions, their party-political dynamics, individual MPs’ activity as well as inter-parliamentary cooperation with the EP. The papers presented in the panel are part of the ongoing edited volume book project related to the parliamentary dimension of the Conference on the Future of Europe.

Title	Details
Czech Parliament and the CoFoE: Observers, Facilitators and Absentees	View Paper Details
The Spanish parliamentary activism in the CoFoE: prioritising the EU level over national politics	View Paper Details
The Conference on the Future of Europe as a window of opportunity for regional parliaments: experiences from the German-speaking parliaments	View Paper Details
The European Parliament and the Conference on the Future of Europe: Between ownership and diverging political visions	View Paper Details