So just what is this term “democratic deficit” that everyone uses when they talk about the EU? I’m going to publish a series of posts examining democracy in the EU – starting with a look at the term itself. The content will mostly come from an essay I’m working on, so apologies if the material is a tad dry. I’ll try to inject a bit of humour where I can – but I was injected myself recently… with yellow fever (I’m moving to Ethiopia in June), so I’m not at my best.

Right – let’s have a look at the origins of the phrase. In fact, it was first coined in the 1979 book “Parliament for Europe” by Professor David Marquand – then British Labour MP and former Chief Advisor to the President of the European Commission (1977-1979). Far from having its origins in the stalwart tradition of British Euroscepticism, the phrase “democratic deficit” was originally part of a call for faster, deeper union. Funny that a term invented to provoke deeper integration has become such a champion cause of eurosceptics, isn’t it?

Marquand – who was then writing about the European Economic Community (the forerunner of today’s European Union) – argued that the “democratic deficit” was slowing the process of European unity, thereby contributing to the economic “Eurosclerosis” of the 1970s and early 1980s. He wrote:

“One of the reasons why the pace of integration has been so slow is that the Commission – which alone has the technical and juridical authority to provide the impetus for further integration – lacks… democratic legitimacy…”

Throughout “Parliament in Europe,” Marquand argued that the “[European] Parliament has had too little weight to play more than a decorative role” and that substantially more “parliamentary accountability” would be needed to encourage further European integration. For Marquand, then, the problem was that the EU had no democratic legitimacy.

Those “undemocratic” Eurocrats are keenly aware of this accusation. The EU even defines the “democratic deficit” itself in an online glossary of terms; the “official” definition being expanded slightly from Marquand’s original to include criticism of the overly-complex nature of EU politics:

“Democratic deficit is a concept invoked principally in the argument that the European Union and its various bodies suffer from a lack of democracy and seem inaccessible to the ordinary citizen because their method of operating is so complex. The view is that the Community institutional set-up is dominated by an institution combining legislative and government powers (the Council of the European Union) and an institution that lacks democratic legitimacy (the European Commission).”

However, as Simon Hix and Andreas Follesdal have pointed out, no commonly agreed definition of the term exists in the literature. Hix and Follesdal have therefore synthesised five main claims, some combination of which is common to most definitions of the “democratic deficit”:

• Firstly, European integration has strengthened national executives at the expense of national parliaments because executive agents are insulated from national parliamentary oversight at the European level. Furthermore, because the EU often represents an alternative route for introducing legislation, national executives are given the option of bypassing their parliaments.

• Secondly, the European parliament is – as Marquand complained – too weak to carry any real weight. This criticism applies less and less as each subsequent treaty revision has strengthened the relative power of the Parliament, but those critics who see the European Parliament as the only truly democratically legitimate institution within the EU might still argue for a stronger Parliament.

• Thirdly, there are no truly “European” elections for the European Parliament. EP elections are seen by European citizens, media and politicians as “second-order” national elections of no great importance. This means that voter turn-out is low, further undermining the legitimacy of the EP and giving disproportionate representation to smaller, fringe political parties. Furthermore, this situation creates a disconnect between the European Parliament (whose area of competence is pan-European) and the issues upon which European voters select their representatives.

• Fourthly, the European Union is seen as being too “distant” from voters. Andrew Moravcsik puts this down to the fact that “an organization of continental scope will, of course, appear rather distant from the individual European citizen.” Moravcsik doesn’t mention how the almost-continental United States of America has solved this problem, but Hix and Follesdal speculate that at least part of this perception may be down to the absence of a truly European demos, at the root of which is the fact that there is no shared language or culture common to all Europeans.

• Finally, Hix and Follesdal suggest that (partly as a result of the above) the “EU adopts policies that are not supported by a majority of citizens in many or even most member states.” The end results of European democracy are therefore judged unsatisfactory, especially when you consider how vulnerable the policy-formation process is to influence from private interest groups.

As a starting definition, then, we can say that a “democratic deficit” entails a lack of democratic legitimacy within a political system resulting from an excessively complex and opaque political process, inadequate public involvement in said process and insufficient seperation of powers and checks and balances. With this broad framework in mind for our definition, we can continue in the next post to examine whether or not the EU really has a democratic deficit.

Photo credits: Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) European Parliament