The European Union democratic deficit: substantive representation in the European Parliament at the input stage

Sorace, Miriam (2018) The European Union democratic deficit: substantive representation in the European Parliament at the input stage. European Union Politics, 19 (1). pp. 3-24. ISSN 1465-1165

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Abstract

The analysis compares voters' preferences in economic policy to political parties' economic written parliamentary questions during the 2009–2014 term of the European Parliament. The corpus of over 55,000 written questions was ideologically scaled via crowdsourcing. The analysis shows that parties are unresponsive to second-order and to disengaged voters. The results also suggest that there is no upper class bias in European Parliament political representation. The data highlight a strong tendency of EP7 political parties to cluster around the position of the average European voter, at the expense of their average supporter. The democratic deficit is therefore at most a pluralism deficit in the European Parliament, since substantive representation in the European Parliament is successful as far as the majoritarian norm is concerned.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Additional Information:	© 2018 by SAGE Publications
Divisions:	European Institute
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory J Political Science > JA Political science (General) J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe)
Date Deposited:	24 Apr 2018 10:07
Last Modified:	18 Apr 2024 16:03
Projects:	GOIPG/2014/300
Funders:	Irish Research Council
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/87625

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