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

Miriam Sorace

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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.

Keywords: crowdsourcing; democratic deficits; European Parliament; European Union; political representation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur, nep-pay and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in European Union Politics, 1, March, 2018, 19(1), pp. 3-24. ISSN: 1465-1165

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:87625

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