Electoral Competition in the European Union

How does electoral competition, a key feature of representative democracy, work in a European Union (EU)’s multilevel system of governance? Since party behavior in elections is strongly conditioned by the system’s design, to what extent does the EU system motivate political parties to compete or collude? In this paper, I analyze electoral competition in the EU by drawing on Bartolini’s (1999, 2000) multidimensional framework (contestability, availability, decidability, vulnerability), which helps understand which constellations of conditions encourage collusive or competitive behavior. In particular, I examine empirical evidence with regard to: the openness of the EU political-electoral market on the supply side (contestability) and the demand side (availability); the decidability of the offer (differentiation between parties) and the vulnerability of incumbency (safety of tenure) at EU institutions. I argue that the conditions for electoral competition in the EU encourage collusive behavior within the mainstream, which tries to survive in an environment it cannot fully control. The behavior of mainstream parties is very short-sighted: they have constructed barriers to competition to protect themselves, assuming that the EU institutions would always be populated by the moderate political forces (Social and Christian Democrats) that sought to rebuild Europe after the World War II. However, the intense politicization of the EU and its policies triggered by exogenous factors (the global financial crisis and the war in Syria) necessitated boosting electoral competition. The European Parliament’s response was the Spitzenkandidaten experiment, which did not bring much change in 2014 (Hobolt 2014; Schmitt et al. 2015; Lefkofridi and Katsanidou 2018). I argue that the Spitzenkandidaten won’t bring much change in the 2019 election either because it does not alter the conditions under which parties compete; it seeks to increase decidability of the offer at the EU level without liberalizing (not even partially) the political market (suppply and/or demand).