Elections in Multilevel Political Systems: Implications for Representative Democracy

In representative parliamentary democracies, parliaments are supposed to perform three fundamental functions: allow the expression and facilitate the transformation of political preferences thus giving voice to the people; forge the popular will to be then enacted by the executive; and exert control over the latter: voice, will and surveillance. The co-existence of two parliamentary levels in the EU multi-level political system causes a separation of these tasks and an unconventional allocation of each to different parliamentary levels (or to none at all). Citizens’ reaction has been so far (mostly) to keep voting as usual, as if national parliaments were still fully in control of all three functions and as if the European Parliament were in control of none. The crisis may put an end to this collective delusion and induce a new awareness as to the real powers of these two parliamentary levels. This chapter will first illustrate the three democratic functions of representative assemblies. It will then argue that in the EU multi-level political system these functions have been separated and allocated to different parliamentary levels, and it will conclude by showing how this affects both institutions and the kind of representation that they can offer European citizens.