The European Parliament: Moving Towards Democracy in the EU.

Edited by Bernard Steunenberg and Jacques Thomassen. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 224p. $70.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This book identifies the rise to prominence of the European Parliament (EP) as “one of the most remarkable developments in European integration” (p. 1). The EP is now a colegislator with the Council of Ministers across a wide range of the European Union's socioeconomic policies. As demonstrated by the resignation of the Santer Commission in March 1999, the EP has also upset the standard interpretation that its power of censure over the EU's main executive body is only theoretical.

In their introduction, Bernard Steunenberg and Jacques Thomassen explain the development of the EP's legislative power as “a result of two important factors: Parliament's persistence to gain more power in the Union's legislative arena and the Member States' handling of the Union's legitimacy” (p. 1). This is an encouraging starting point. It acknowledges the duality of parliamentary politics as part arena where actors pursue their individual preferences and part arena where they come together to satisfy normative preconditions for collective action (see esp. J. Habermas, Between Fact and Norms, 1996, p. 180).

The following eight chapters are organized into three parts. In the first section on representation, Thomassen challenges the argument that the problem of representation is one of “weak and incohesive” parties that do not compete on “European issues.” The empirical evidence demonstrates that the EP party groups are adequately cohesive for the functions they are called upon to perform and that their alignments are by no means rigid or uncompetitive. It is by no means clear why the “left-right” issues on which they align are “not European” ones. Indeed, any substitution of a “pro-anti European dimension” for the left-right pattern would make little sense. First, it is Member States, and not the EP, that most directly decide questions of more or less European integration (through the treaty formation process). Second, the left-right preferences of the members of the EP (MEPs) who make up the party groups turn out to be well correlated with those of voters.

Turning to the other two contributors to the section on representation, Bernhard Wessels explains the preferences of MEPs for European solutions as being positively correlated with globalization and negatively correlated with confidence in domestic institutions. Luciano Bardi then updates his intriguing account of how the EP's party system is subject to a degree of fragmentation with each round of European elections, followed by concentration and consolidation between elections.

Tapio Raunio and Roger Scully make two neatly complementary contributions to a section on members and parties. Raunio presents the results of a useful survey into links between MEPs and their national parties. He finds that as many as 71.2% report no attempt to control their behavior, even though it is national parties that reward or sanction their careers either by controlling their reentry to domestic politics or by deciding whether they are to be selected again as candidates for European elections. Scully, in contrast, uses roll calls to analyze his chosen theme of political socialization among MEPs. He finds that few “go native.” Many are already native to the degree that they are self-selected from the pro-European sections of political elites. Yet few entirely leave the domestic arena for the European, since the role of the MEP is defined at the interface of the two.

The section on the EP as legislator opens with an important reappraisal by Stefanie Balier and Gerald Schneider of present theories of MEP behavior. Their conclusion is that argument and debate really do matter in “shaming” out certain positions. Transnational party disciplines with surprising supranational biases then inhibit backsliding. In contrast, George Tsebelis and Anastassios Kalandrakis cast a critical eye over the use of statistics on the acceptance of the EP's amendments to make claims about its performance. Apart from deflating the EP's claims to have been remarkably successful in comparison with the national parliaments (on the grounds it should compare itself with legislatures in presidential and not parliamentary systems), Tsebelis and Kalandrakis carefully unpick a number of shortcomings in the aggregate statistics. These make no allowance for the importance of amendments, for the degree to which they are accepted, or for cases where the MEPs table amendments they expect to fail in the short term, while shaping commission proposals in the long.

So does The European Parliament succeed in its aims? That part of the argument which attributes the development of the EP to the ingenuity and persistence of its members is admirably established. That part which attributes it to the “Member States handling of the Union's legitimacy” disappears from all but Steunenberg's own chapter, which questions whether it is enough to explain the strengthening of the codecision procedure by the Amsterdam Treaty as a strategic decision by governments that faced little marginal cost in conceding a change the EP had to all intents and purposes already forced unilaterally.

Not only is much more research needed on why actors see legitimation benefits in the empowerment of the EP, but the question also is unlikely to be answered without breaking down some of the barriers between analytical political science and normative political theory. Any decision about whether it is prudent or otherwise to “manage the legitimacy of the EU” by conceding powers to the EP is much more than a bet on the current state of sociological belief about the rightful exercise of political power. Where that belief is normatively indefensible on its own terms, it will soon unravel. Conversely, there are few normative justifications for the empowerment of Union institutions (especially consequential ones) that do not themselves contain empirical claims without which they are only contingent and provisional. Research into the empowerment of the EP is surely running into diminishing returns of what can be done from within a discipline that so perversely boasts an antinormative bias.