The consolidation of two channels of representation in the EU

The two channels of democratic representation in the EU have been extensively studied. On the one hand, political scientists have documented how the Common Assembly, which was established as part of the European Coal and Steel Community (1951), has developed from what was at most an embryonic parliament into the EP as we know it today, as a co-legislator almost on a par with the Council of Ministers (Rittberger, Reference Rittberger2005). One important milestone was the introduction of direct elections of members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in 1979, replacing the delegated national parliamentarians it had been composed of until then. Thus, the EP was ready to enhance its powers when European cooperation accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. Step by step, from the 1986 Single European Act to the now defunct Treaty of Lisbon, the scope of its legislative power has been expanded so as to bring the EP almost on a par with the Council. Also, the EP has steadily developed its powers of scrutiny over the Commission.

In the course of this process, the EP has steadily moved towards becoming a mature ‘normal’ parliament with its internal dynamics resembling that of other, national parliaments (Hix et al., Reference Hix, Roland and Noury2007). MEPs have organized themselves in ideological formations corresponding to the ideologies that dominate at the national level: Christian-Democrats and (moderate) conservatives, Social-Democrats, Liberals, Greens, (Post-)Socialists, and Conservatives. MEPs’ voting behaviour has come to conform to ideological cleavages such as left vs. right, economy vs. environment, conservative vs. progressive, hence downplaying national difference as the most salient organizing dimension.

Thus, it appeared that as EU affairs slipped out of the control of national parliaments, the EP would gain powers to fill the gap, and to provide EU politics with the necessary democratic legitimacy. Yet, formal gaps persist in that certain powers have come to be shared at the European level without the EP becoming fully involved, as is, for instance, the case in the Common Commercial Policy and the Common Agricultural Policy. However, there remains a deeper problem beyond extending formal powers to the EP. As has been pointedly observed by former MEPs Michiel van Hulten and Nick Clegg (Reference Van Hulten and Clegg2003: 4), ‘While [the EP] has steadily increased its powers in the legislative and inter-institutional arrangements of the EU, it has not yet succeeded in translating its authority into a more visible role amongst Europe’s electorates’. This is also reflected in the fact that elections for the EP remain ‘second order elections’ (Reif and Schmitt, Reference Reif and Schmitt1980; Marsh, Reference Marsh1998): turnouts systematically lag behind those for national elections; voting behaviour reflects, above all, attitudes towards national politics; and voters are more likely to cast their votes for smaller parties, which reflects the perception that there is less at stake. These observations reinforce the perception of a persistent democratic deficit, as the EP, however much its powers have increased, fails to make up fully for the representative losses at the national level (Weiler et al., Reference Weiler, Haltern and Mayer1995; Follesdal and Hix, Reference Follesdal and Hix2006).

The limitations in the EP’s ability to become the principal focus of democratic representation in the EU, naturally brings attention back to the role of national parliaments. As was made apparent in the Protocol on National Parliaments attached to the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, national parliaments have, in the words of Raunio and Hix (Reference Raunio and Hix2000), ‘learned to fight back’; they no longer passively accept the weakening effects of European integration on their powers. Yet, as subsequent research has shown, there remain major variations between parliaments in the extent to which they have been successful in doing so (Maurer and Wessels, Reference Maurer and Wessels2001). Still, in the Treaty of Lisbon the reappraisal of the role of national parliaments continued with the inclusion of a special article on the role of national parliaments in the EU (Article 8C Treaty of Lisbon) and of a protocol that would ensure them to be kept fully abreast on EU policy-initiatives. Most notably, this treaty would have established an ‘early warning mechanism’ to allow national parliaments to act upon subsidiarity infringements.

There are thus two channels of representation in the EU that are not likely to replace one another. Although they share the same vocation of representing the people, there are important structural differences between national parliaments and the EP. For one, a single integrated supranational parliament, like the EP, operates in a manner that is different from the coordinated effort of 27 national parliaments. Furthermore, the EP is exclusively dedicated to EU decision-making, whereas national parliaments see the EU as their secondary, and the national as their primary task. At the same time, national parliaments enjoy powers over the full range of tasks that the government subject to their oversight undertakes, while the EP has no proper government to control, neither does it exercise the same amount of control over all issues that the other EU bodies (notably the Council) are engaged with.

What is more, the two channels of parliamentary representation are based on different principles of representation (see Table 1). The indirect channel through the national parliaments entails that interests are first aggregated at the national level across the ideological division lines that may be present, and then governments encounter each other in the Council primarily as national representatives with their ideological personae taking second place. There is, moreover, considerable variation in the national electoral systems through which voters choose their national parliamentarians. On the other hand, for the EP-elections, all member states follow by now the principle of proportional representation. Still, each member state operates as an electoral district (which may be subdivided again) with a given number of seats to distribute and its own lists on which national parties compete. While Euro-parliamentarians are elected on their national party platform, they join up in transnational party-groups only after being elected. European party organizations have taken shape, but for now the locus of political control remains firmly at the level of national parties. Thus, the national parliaments and the EP are anything but perfect equivalents. What is more, given the wide range of variation among national parliaments in the EU, the division of roles with the EP is likely to vary from one state to another.

While most research thus far has focussed on only one of the two channels, some researchers have started to thematize their coexistence. From the mid-1990s onwards, Neunreither (Reference Neunreither1994, Reference Neunreither2006) has charted the relations between the EP and the national parliaments, as well as the range of proposals that have been put forward over time to improve this relation. Kiiver’s critical review of the potential of national parliaments to influence EU decision-making eventually has him return to the importance of ‘bolstering a solid European Parliament’ (Kiiver, Reference Kiiver2006: 182). Speaking to the EP, Wessels and Diedrichs (Reference Wessels and Diedrichs1997) have underlined that a proper evaluation of the EP’s legitimacy requires ‘a new concept of legitimacy for a new kind of parliament’, which can appreciate its performance in the wider context of the EU’s multilevel system in which European, national, and sub-national processes of decision-making are increasingly fused. Maurer (Reference Maurer2002) actually uses the concept of European multilevel-parliamentarism (europäischen Mehrebenenparlamentarismus) as an overarching label for his empirical analysis of the EP’s and national parliaments’ engagement in EU affairs.

The most ambitious theoretical attempt to integrate the study of the channels of representation in the EU has come from Benz (Reference Benz2003), who has proposed to conceive of the EU as a ‘compound polity’, with a multiplicity of interacting structures of interest representation. Benz highlights the fact that while EU policy-making allows for a wide range of channels of interest representation, it is still able to deliver policies effectively. However, he concedes that this comes at the price of democratic accountability: it becomes indiscernible where decisions are taken, who can be held responsible, as well as how they can be corrected.

In different ways these studies highlight the need for (rather than that they themselves furnish) an overarching analytical framework that allows us to capture the two channels of representation in relation to each other – which includes recognizing the structural differences between them. Given the distinctive traits of the EU’s representative system, such an overarching framework is a prerequisite for a proper evaluation of the representative-democratic quality of EU decision-making as a whole. Such a framework would make it possible to relate the empirical research on democratic representation in the EU to the normative debates about the EU’s democratic deficit and, indeed, to the prospects for representative democracy beyond the nation-state in general.

A proper conception of the EU’s representative-democratic structure will rest on certain ideas about the nature of the EU polity. Clearly, the EU can neither be considered an international organization, nor a state. For this reason, we outline and review three conceptions of the structure of democratic representation in the EU: a federal two-channel system, a parliamentary network, and the Multilevel Parliamentary Field. The first two of these are quite well established conceptions that analysts have, to different degrees, applied to the EU. The third, the Multilevel Parliamentary Field, is new but is, we will argue, the most apt way of conceptualizing the distinctive structure of democratic representation in the EU.

EU inter-parliamentary relations as a federal system

The most obvious way to conceive of the structure of democratic representation in the EU is in terms of a federal system. Like the EU, federal systems are marked by the fact that they have two channels of representation. Generally, a federation provides for a representative body at the federal level, while at the same time the autonomy of its component parts is recognized by providing for a second channel of representation that runs through the states. Within the federal system, the two channels are incorporated in an integrated structure of representative bodies, where the relations among these are constitutionalized with a clear division of tasks.

In practice, two variants of federalism can be distinguished depending on how competences are divided between the two levels (cf. Scharpf, Reference Scharpf1988: 242ff). On the one hand, dual or bipolar federalism is premised on a clearly delineated division of competences between the federal and the state level. This variant assumes institutional symmetry across levels: the institutional structure of the government at the federal level is duplicated at the state level. The parliament at the federal level has as its constituency the entire polity, but has its powers limited to those issue-areas that are under federal jurisdiction. Each parliament at the state level has that state as its constituency, and bears on those issue-areas that are under state jurisdiction. The most salient contemporary examples of bipolar federalism are the United States, Canada, Australia and India.

The other federal variant can be labelled the unipolar model of federalism, and sees the federal compact as embedded in a set of central institutions that have binding force on the parties to the federal compact. The central institutions are based on a combination of two principles of representation: representation by population and representation by territory. The people are represented in the central institutions directly through elected representatives and indirectly through representatives from each member state/entity. The closest contemporary variant of this is the German version of federalism (Jeffery and Savigear, Reference Jeffery and Savigear1991).

For both variants it is clear that the federal constitution requires a considerable degree of coherence in the structure of democratic representation, across levels and among the individual states. While the unipolar model relies on a highly integrated representative structure at the federal level, the bipolar model requires a high level of compatibility and comparability of the political structures throughout the federal system. In the end, in both variants the structure of democratic representation is subject to formal rules that define the division of roles and the hierarchical relations between them. In the bipolar system, the two levels of representation delineate the limits of each other’s action, as each level has its own repository of competences. In some contrast, the unipolar system is based on a distinctive form of hierarchy between the two representative principles: direct polity-wide election of the federal parliament (in Germany, the Bundestag) and indirect representation of the citizens of each state through their representatives in the federal chamber of state representatives (in Germany, the Bundesrat). Here the federal level takes on primacy, given that it is where the two, direct and indirect, principles of representation are harmonized. The state level is more preoccupied with implementation.

Even if the competences of the EU level have been circumscribed, decision-making in the EU tends to resemble the unipolar rather than the bipolar version of federalism. As highlighted above, the EU level combines two channels of democratic representation, where one (the EP) is elected directly by the people, and the other (the Council) represents the people indirectly through their states. Within this modified unipolar structure, national parliaments exercise democratic control over EU decision-making through their national governments. Though the EU has traits of a unipolar federal system, there are several characteristic features of the EU that make it stand out from the federal models we are familiar with. Moreover, while these differences may be less pertinent when it comes to questions concerning, for instance, the division of competences between levels, they have a particular bearing on the structure of democratic representation.

Four characteristics of the EU stand out in this respect. First, even if the EU may be taken as an overarching constitutional structure, it lacks a federal government. In fact, most executive responsibility for EU policies goes back to the national governments. At the EU level, executive powers have traditionally been delegated to the European Commission, which is supposed to execute its tasks to the general interest of the Union, regardless of ideological orientation. Besides the Commission, the secretariat of the Council of the EU and a host of independent European agencies have come to administer substantial executive tasks. Rather than putting EU executive power under parliamentary control, the predominant idea seems to be that it is to be controlled by fragmenting it. In the absence of an EU-level government at its apex, the EU has far less coherence as a political system than does any federal state. The implication of this is that the EP, as the supposedly ‘federal-level parliament’, lacks a proper governmental counterpart or at least finds it dispersed across different institutions and levels.

Second, in contrast to any democratic federal constitution that would see to it that all powers are subject to democratic control, the evolution of democratic representation systematically lags behind the allocation of competences to the EU level. Even if the powers of the EP have steadily expanded, it is still excluded from a substantial range of EU-level decisions. There thus remains a significant level of incongruence between the tasks actually allocated to the EU level on the one hand, and the representative body’s ability to control these at that very same level, on the other.Footnote 1 What is more, when it comes to institutional revisions in the EU’s basic law, the Treaties, the procedures do not require the involvement of the EP or any alternative elected body at the European level.

Third, and this is an element that makes the EU quite unique as a polity in today’s world, is that it is a modified polycentric, not a classical monocentric, system of governance. A system of polycentric governance is ‘an arrangement for making binding decisions over a multiplicity of actors that delegates authority of functional tasks to a set of dispersed and relatively autonomous agencies that are not controlled – de jure or de facto – by a single collective institution’ (Schmitter and Kim, Reference Schmitter and Kim2005: 6). There is then, essentially, no single institution, and not even a single level, within the EU that can be seen as the centre where sovereignty is embodied. Indeed, in many respects the national governments operate as distinct political (sub-)centers for their citizens, even if they have come to pool and delegate important powers to the European level. When it comes to political representation, this polycentric character is reflected in the fact that, as ‘second-order elections’, the elections for the EP are rather perceived as 27 parallel elections than as amounting to a truly EU-wide ballot.

This leads to the fourth, and final, feature that sets the EU apart from federal states. Compared to basically all federal systems (India is to some extent excepted notably in cultural but not in institutional terms), it is marked by an almost unprecedented cultural pluralism and institutional heterogeneity. What matters most here is the great amount of institutional diversity that shows up in the huge discrepancies in the size of the Member States; significant vertical institutional incongruence, through federal, quasi-federal, and unitary arrangements at the member-state level, and a great amount of horizontal institutional heterogeneity at the Union level through different systems of representation and accountability, and far more so at the Member State level, where there are great variations in how power is shared and organized from one member state to the next (see also Table 1 in the previous section and the accompanying text). This lack of institutional symmetry makes it extremely difficult to work out any division of powers and competences in a manner consistent with federal organizational models.

Table 1

National parliaments and the European Parliament compared

EU = European Union.

Thus, there are a number of distinctive traits of democratic representation in the EU that do not sit well with federal organizational models. Applying established federal organizational models risks blinding us to some of the distinctive traits and dynamics that are at work within and between the EU’s parliamentary institutions. Thus, it is necessary to consider alternative notions to that of the federal system.

EU inter-parliamentary relations as a parliamentary network

The network notion suggests itself for various reasons as an alternative, more open, concept to conceive of the structure of democratic representation in the EU. For one, the concept of ‘network’ is frequently adopted by parliaments themselves to characterize their inter-relations. For instance, in its opinion on the European Commission’s proposal for ‘A Competitive Automotive Regulatory System for the 21st Century’, the EP proposes to establish ‘an inter-parliamentary network on automotive issues’ (European Parliament, 2007: 3).

At the same time, within the field of EU studies, the network concept has found favour among scholars who consider the EU as a case of ‘multilevel governance’ (Hooghe and Marks, Reference Hooghe and Marks2003; Kohler-Koch and Rittberger, Reference Kohler-Koch and Rittberger2006). This approach underlines how authority in the political system of the EU is no longer concentrated or hierarchically ordered as it was supposed to be in traditional (state) systems of government. Instead, authority has come to be dispersed across levels and even between public and private actors. Thus, as Eising and Kohler-Koch (cited in Kohler-Koch and Rittberger, Reference Kohler-Koch and Rittberger2006: 34) elucidate, EU governance can be characterized as ‘a system of network governance’ in which ‘the “state” is vertically and horizontally segmented and its role has changed from authoritative allocation “from above” to the role of an “activator”. Governing the EU involves bringing together the relevant state and societal actors and building issue-specific constituencies’. These analytical-empirical theories resonate with normative theory, notably the theoretical position of ‘directly-deliberative polyarchy’ (Cohen and Sabel, Reference Cohen and Sabel1997). This position highlights how EU democracy combines decentralization and diversity of policy-making with the deliberative capacities of the societal actors involved. Notably, in the directly-deliberative polyarchy approach, legislatures are no longer engaged in substantial policy-making but are left with the procedural task of ensuring that the conditions necessary for ‘deliberation within and among units’ are maintained (Cohen and Sabel, Reference Cohen and Sabel1997: 331).

The applicability of the network concept to inter-parliamentary relations in the EU is less self-evident than it may appear at first sight. The prevailing uses of the concept leave little room for attributing a distinctive status to parliaments in the governance process (cf. Peters and Pierre, Reference Peters and Pierre2004). Rather parliaments appear as just another set of actors vying for authority (Slaughter, Reference Slaughter2004: Ch. 3). Even less likely is it that the network notion actually allows us to capture the particular dimensions along which parliaments operate in EU decision-making and the structural differences that exist between them.

The network notion is useful to describe how previously independent bodies have become linked in a horizontal structure with functional relations between them. European integration has located the national parliament and the EP within one single European political system. Within this structure the national parliaments fulfil similar representative functions, albeit in different places, and have developed informal and more formal links (also with the EP), in order to grapple with similar issues and to benefit from exchanging experiences and coordinating their actions.

The concept of parliamentary network has some analytical purchase on the EU, as it can accommodate considerable diversity in the character and in the interaction between parliaments. In some cases, the interaction may be quite intense and even become institutionalized. In other cases the link can be quite weak. In fact, rather than each and every parliament needing to be connected to all the others, the network notion allows for more dispersed patterns of interaction. The network is also open: New parliaments can easily be included in the network. The network notion thus sits well with the EU’s polycentric character, and allows for a wide range of diverse practices in how national parliaments bring their influence to bear on EU decision-making.

But the flexible – or rather indiscriminate – character of the network notion also limits its analytical utility. For one, its focus is on the relations among the components of the network, not on how each organization that makes up the network is structured. Thus, the network notion leaves little room for appreciating the norms that constitute them and their behaviour. This is of course of particular concern when it comes to parliamentary institutions whose existence is crucially premised on certain normative expectations about democratic representation.

The indiscriminate character of the network concept becomes particularly apparent when one considers how it is to accommodate the role of the EP. Though the EP is certainly unable to shoulder the democratic legitimacy of the EU by itself, it now fulfils a crucial function in the EU’s structure of democratic representation that the national parliaments cannot do without. However, this is not apparent when it is conceptualized as a part of the parliamentary network, as this notion does not provide the means to conceptualize the EP’s distinctive status as a supranational parliament, with distinct functions emanating from that particular role, which puts it in a specific relation to the national parliaments. The network notion really only holds two options: either it treats the EP as just another parliament, that is, assumes that the EP is not structurally and functionally distinct from the national parliaments, or it disqualifies the EP as a parliament like all the others and relegates its role to that of an accessory ‘in networking with national parliamentarians and helping serve as a catalyst for their interactions with one another’ (Slaughter, Reference Slaughter2004: 124).Footnote 2

The network notion also does not provide any clear perspective on the totality of institutions and the structured character of their inter-relations, as a collection of institutions. Given its loose character, the network notion directs us to see democratic representation in the EU as essentially decentralized and fragmented. By implication one is led to expect only a limited degree of coherence among national parliaments in their oversight over EU decision-making. More generally, one can say that the horizontal orientation of the network notion makes it difficult to incorporate properly the distinctive vertical, multilevel dimension that shapes inter-parliamentary relations in the EU.

As a consequence, the network concept cannot make sense of the fact that by now parliamentary relations within the EU have taken on certain systemic properties, so that individual parliaments not only act on each other as isolated entities but rather as intrinsic parts of the process of Europeanization which acts on them in turn (Featherstone and Radaelli, Reference Featherstone and Radaelli2003; Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2006). What is more, the network notion cannot conceive of the impact of the network as a whole, as an integrated structure. Such a more integral assessment is necessary if we are to understand the overall democratic quality of the structure that is being wrought.

In sum, then, to capture the representative character of the EU, the notion of parliamentary network cannot be considered an improvement on the proven terminology of a federal system. Yet, we believe there is a third option: the Multilevel Parliamentary Field.

EU inter-parliamentary relations as a Multilevel Parliamentary Field

As a third conception of the structure of democratic representation in the EU, we propose the Multilevel Parliamentary Field. The concept of the Multilevel Parliamentary Field – a conceptual innovation first developed in this article – is a heuristic device to chart how inter-parliamentary relations are structured in the EU, to establish how this reflects upon the distribution of authority in EU decision-making, and to clarify the character and quality of EU democracy. The field is defined by the joint function that its constitutive institutions are supposed to serve, namely democratic representation. Thus, the field can encompass a wide range of parliamentary institutions at different levels within the EU. The field notion highlights, in particular, the emergence of institutions and norms that serve the coordination of the EU’s constituent parliaments.

The concept of the Multilevel Parliamentary Field draws together two hitherto separate bodies of literature with different disciplinary origins: on the one hand the notion of parliamentary-representative government with origins in political science and democratic theory, and on the other hand the notion of organizational field with origins in organizational sociology. The former has been referred to and will be returned to ahead; the latter requires some elaboration here. DiMaggio and Powell (Reference DiMaggio and Powell1983: 148) characterize an ‘organizational field’ as ‘those institutions that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life’, with some element of connectedness and structural equivalence. This notion of an organizational field needs to be slightly revised when it is to be applied to the realm of inter-parliamentary relations. For Powell and DiMaggio and their followers (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991), the ‘recognized area of life’ to which the field refers has generally been defined in sectoral terms. In contrast, the EU’s Multilevel Parliamentary Field is not foremost a (professional) sector; what keeps its components together is a shared function and the role perception that comes with it: that of representing people’s interests in EU decision-making.

Thus, in constructing our notion of Multilevel Parliamentary Field we draw on a broad range of sources, including the godfather of the field notion, Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1980, Reference Bourdieu1989). Also, in Bourdieu’s conception, a field serves to denote a complex of relations between institutions or actors. However, in his account, sectoral delineation is only one aspect of what defines the field. Equally important are the normative orientations that hold the field together and the resources that can be turned into effective use in the field. This also entails that the delineation of the field is much less of a voluntarist matter, wherein individual elements can be added and detached from the field at will, as if it were a network. Rather in Bourdieu’s conception, the nature (identity) of the institutions in the field is essentially defined by virtue of their position in the field in relation to the other constitutive units. While Bourdieu does not discard the distinctive capacities of the individual institutions and actors, he insists that the field takes on certain properties and dynamics that are of a structural character and that therefore cannot be reduced to its individual components.

This structural trait of the Multilevel Parliamentary Field helps to make clear that to establish the democratic quality of the EU we cannot simply sum up the performance of each individual parliament involved. Such an approach would fail to appreciate the way in which these institutions link up together. For instance, while an increase in the powers of the EP or a strengthening of the scrutiny powers of the Danish Folketing clearly serves those parliaments, the impact on the representative-democratic quality of the EU requires those changes to be assessed in the wider context, with a view to the impact that they have on other representative institutions (which emulate, learn, and copy from each other), and on the system as a whole.

The Multilevel Parliamentary Field thus recognizes – as does the network – that democratic representation in the EU is more disaggregated than a full-fledged EU-federal representative system would have been. But the field notion is premised on a greater level of coherence, if not in organizational structures, then at least in norms and orientations than would be a EU parliamentary network. Further, the field concept is better equipped to recognize the normative character of parliaments as sites of democratic representation, and to recognize the qualitative differences that exist between them, including the distinctive role of the EP. As a consequence, the field notion is also more attentive to the ways in which the different sites of democratic representation in the EU condition each other’s behaviour.

With federalism, the Multilevel Parliamentary Field shares the focus on parliaments as representative institutions and on the division of tasks and competencies across levels. However, the field expands beyond federal organizational models, because it neither presupposes institutional symmetry among representative bodies, nor that they need to fit into a clearly laid out (hierarchical) organizational structure. The Multilevel Parliamentary Field allows for greater variation among the component units and patterns of formal and informal parliamentary interaction (horizontally and vertically), and hence is compatible with less hierarchical and more loosely coupled patterns of interaction. Such coupling is however premised on norms that delineate a set of basic values and a shared democratic practice. These traits also make the field well suited to caption the European process of integration, in which constitutional constraints are gradually worked out as the system becomes further cemented.

Our conception of the Multilevel Parliamentary Field deviates most explicitly from the previous uses of the field notion in its normative implications. For sociologists like Bourdieu, Powell and DiMaggio, the concept of the field serves primarily empirical functions by revealing relations and processes that might otherwise go unnoticed. Beyond providing more complete and exact knowledge that actors can use to whatever purposes they choose, the concept serves no normative or critical function. However, since the Multilevel Parliamentary Field is about democratic representation, any empirical depiction of the field will immediately bear upon the normative standards embedded in democratic theory. In fact, this interplay between the empirical uses of the Multilevel Parliamentary Field and normative conceptions of democracy can be seen as one of its foremost merits.

Ultimately, then, the Multilevel Parliamentary Field serves to address the following complementary concerns: What is the character of the EU’s Parliamentary Field? And what does this tell us about the character and quality of EU democracy? To establish the characteristic features of the EU’s parliamentary field, it is necessary to consider: (a) the character and density of inter-parliamentary interaction; (b) the character of the field’s constitutive units (parliaments); and (c) the manner in which these two dimensions relate and interact to give overall shape to the field. These findings then yield vital input to the second question, namely the character and quality of EU democracy.

Conclusion and prospects

The multilevel configuration that makes up the EU raises many conceptual and empirical challenges; this article has focussed on the one that emanates from the EU’s two channels of democratic representation. If it is accepted that representation through the national parliaments and through the EP are both indispensable elements of the EU’s democratic legitimacy, and that their interaction escapes any integral federal arrangement, then more traditional polity approaches cannot adequately conceive of the structure of democratic representation in the EU. To fill this gap we have developed the notion of the Multilevel Parliamentary Field.

The Multilevel Parliamentary Field paves the way for the integrated analysis of democratic representation in the EU. More particularly, we have argued that conceiving of inter-parliamentary relations in the EU in terms of a Multilevel Parliamentary Field serves to expand the analysis of inter-parliamentary relations as it points to the importance of: empirical depth that includes not only formal arrangements but also actual interactions and the norms governing them; internal variation in norms and resources and its implications for the distribution of power; the dynamic character of inter-parliamentary relations over time; and the intrinsic link between the actual developments in the EU and normative theories of democracy beyond the nation-state.

The notion of the Multilevel Parliamentary Field has implications well beyond the analysis of the two channels of parliamentary representation in the EU. The study of the interaction and the coherence of the two parliamentary channels can be seen as a first step towards a more comprehensive analysis of democracy in the EU. Obviously, parliaments and formal political institutions do not exhaust the ways in which citizens are represented in the decision-making process in the EU. Many studies have pointed to the role of civil society, interest groups and NGOs as alternatives or complements to electoral representation. Such non-parliamentary channels can be accommodated by broadening and revamping the parliamentary field as ‘a representative field’. One could go even further and propose ‘a democratic field’ which would also accommodate democratic engagement through directly democratic devices (like the referendums that have been regularly employed by member states on EU issues and the Citizens’ initiative proposed in the Treaty of Lisbon), the media and the public sphere in more general terms. Obviously, however, such extensions greatly raise the complexity of the analysis and, as a consequence, will make it much harder to get to any concrete findings.

Another avenue for research may be to apply the notion of the parliamentary field (comparatively) to other multilevel political systems. Here, one can think of other international organizations to the extent that they provide for some additional mechanisms of democratic involvement besides the member states channel. However, the notion of a parliamentary field may be particularly fruitful when projected on federal states that are marked by great internal complexity and asymmetry. Canada appears as the most obvious such asymmetrical case in point, but one could also consider the cases of Belgium and Spain.

As political communities are becoming ever more translucent in this era of globalization, it becomes more difficult to think of single parliamentary institutions offloading the task of representing ‘the people’. Under these conditions political scientists, and indeed ‘the people’ themselves, need to be able to conceive of representative institutions in relation to each other. The concept of the Multilevel Parliamentary Field can be seen as a first step towards that end.