The EU as a multilevel representative democracy: between legitimacy and contestation

Abstract

The European Union (EU) and its member states are experiencing the crisis of representative democracy manifested by decreasing trust in representative institutions such as parliaments, increasing polarisation in European politics and societies, populist electoral gains and widespread citizens’ dissatisfaction with elected representatives and democracy in general. This panel explores the EU as an evolving representative democracy (art. 10 TEU) shaped by processes of (de)legitimization and contestation across institutional levels and political arenas. Conceptualizing the EU as a multilevel and transnational polity - a political system sui generis - the panel brings together papers that examine how democratic representation and legitimacy are constructed, contested and negotiated within and among supranational and national representative institutions (parliaments) as well as between them and European citizens. While focusing on different arenas (European Parliament and national parliaments), actors (MPs, MEPs, political parties & administrative staff) as well as analytical dimensions, the contributions of this panel are united by a shared concern with how democratic practices of parliaments and their elected representatives are redefined within the EU “multilevel parliamentary field” under conditions of institutional complexity, transnationalisation and growing citizen disenchantment with democracy. The papers gathered in this panel address, among others, the questions of the construction of parliamentary cultures at the transnational level, the interface between representative and participatory dimensions of EU democracy, relational power between the EP and national parliaments, as well as the responsibility of citizens’ representatives for the condition of EU transnational democracy, including for the quality of public discourse and political communication.

Title	Details
Preferences for Representation and Responsiveness in International Bureaucracies: a Survey Experiment	View Paper Details
1. Democratic Legitimacy of the European Parliament: Finnish MEPs’ Constructions of European and National Political Cultures and Practices	View Paper Details
Guardians of Transnational Representation? Parliamentary Elites and Disillusionment with Citizen Participation in the EU	View Paper Details
Responsibility for and Ownership of EU Democracy: Unravelling the Discursive Dynamics of Interparliamentary Relations	View Paper Details
4. Weakening of Representative Democracy? A Comparative Analysis of Discursive Incivilities in French and Polish Parliaments	View Paper Details