Parties and the European Union

The EU plays a central role in constituting the multilevel European political order and suffers from a democratic deficit. To understand the deficit, we must take political parties into account. REDIRECT discusses the democratic deficit from the perspective of a representative disconnect. One aspect relates to problems of properly scaling up parties to the EU-level. The purpose of this paper is to discuss why and how that is and what that tells us about the disconnect. The paper starts by clarifying the role of parties within the broader context of the representative disconnect, a problem that is not confined to the structure and process of intermediation (those institutions connecting citizens to the political system), but broadly and in terms of a complex ecosystem of representation, which includes governance and accountability as well as affective forms of disconnect. Clarifying the role of parties within the broader context of the representative disconnect sets the stage for the main line of inquiry, namely, the problems of scaling up parties to the European level. That is not straightforward because we need to take the distinct features of the EU political system directly into account. The EU is both a profoundly contested political system (there is no agreement on what type of polity the EU is or should become), and it deviates considerably from the nation-state as the setting we have become accustomed to associate with party government. Put simply, then, the more distinct the EU is qua polity the more explicit attention we must pay to the process of scaling up. We outline several approaches to scaling up and discuss these against the role parties currently play at the EU-level. These examinations help render clear why and how the problems associated with parties’ scaling up contribute to the representative disconnect.