5 Aggregation across the parliamentary and electoral arenas combined

Section 3 summarised research on the work of the EP party groups in aggregating the preferences of representatives. Section 4 did the same for the role of national parties in aggregating the preferences of voters in European elections. But are we in any position to assess the overall capacity of the EU party system to aggregate across the electoral and parliamentary arenas combined? A good starting point is with the seminal work of Herman Schmitt and Jacques Thomassen Schmitt and Thomassen (2000 ).

In both the 1979 and 1994 European elections, Schmitt and Thomassen found a close fit (with correlation coefficient of 0.88 (1979) and 0.82 (1994)) between the left-right orientations of candidates and those who voted for them (Schmitt and Thomassen 2000 : 323). They also found that candidates and their voters in European elections were well matched in their general attitudes towards integration, and even where they diverged on its specifics, there was a tendency over time for parties to follow changes in their voters preferences towards integration, rather than vice versa (Schmitt and Thomassen 2000 : 318).

All of this has an important implication: even though European elections are second-order contests between national parties, voters seem to end up with representatives whose preferences are fairly close to their own along dimensions of choice relevant to the EU. Using the categories set out in Section 1 and the research reviewed in Sections 3 and Section 4, it is not hard to see how Schmitt and Thomassen’s argument might be elaborated into an assessment of aggregation in the EU arena.

If we accept that for all the complex variety of national parties on offer across the Union in any one European election, ‘left-right’ is a general choice of policy direction available to all voters – and pro-anti integration is a choice of direction that comes into play wherever there is voter demand for it – there surely is a sense in which any two voters from anywhere in the Union can aggregate and co-ordinate their preferences through a broadly compatible structure of ‘offers’? Also, the two dimensions – themselves broad aggregates – surely imply that the party politics of the Union largely end up considering a wide-range of issues in relation to one another?

Yet present arrangements also preserve the familiar. To the extent that a large amount of voting remains habitual and even the de-aligned feel a need to choose between familiar ‘brands’, relative falls in turn-out between national and European elections may even be minimised by a continued role for national parties in both sets of elections. In sum, then, a benign view of the status quo is that voters benefit from a double simplification that drastically economises on the information they need to make meaningful choices in European elections: an underlying dimensionality allows them to make general choices of policy direction that are relevant to the Union and those dimensions can largely be accessed through choices between national parties.

Others, however, are less convinced that present patterns of party politics can work simultaneously across both dimensions. Citing research by Cees Van Der Eijk and Mark Franklin (Van Der Eijk and Franklin 2004 ), Stefano Bartolini doubts that voters ‘can choose a party on the basis of its EU position, while at the same time choosing on the basis of its left-right position’ (Bartolini 2005 : 345). Indeed, it might be added that two-dimensional structures of political choice present precisely the conditions under which it is hard to aggregate preferences without arbitrariness.

Defenders of the status quo are thus forced to claim either that two-dimensionality does not matter very much or that it can be managed. Here they are likely to argue, first, that one of the dimensions – left-right – is clearly more important than the other in both the parliamentary and electoral arenas of EU politics; and, second, that the two dimensions are, in any case, procedurally separable. Choices of both voters and their representatives can be aggregated separately along the two dimensions: through European elections and the EP in the case of ‘left-right’ preferences and through Treaty change in the case of ‘pro-anti integration’ preferences. The powers of the EP are mainly left-right. Its scope to act unilaterally along the pro-anti integration dimension only arises where it can change its own internal rules of procedure in ways that affect the operationalisation of specific Treaty powers (Hix 2002b ; Hix and Lord 1996 ). Even then, the EP aggregates the preferences of representatives through legislative and other single-issue coalitions, rather than governing ones. This gives national party delegations the flexibility to combine differently depending on which of the two dimensions they think is the more salient to their voters. Curiously, there is probably no better evidence for this than the relationship that the British Conservatives have had with the EPP since 1992.

Rather than attempt to settle this argument about the manageability of two dimensionality, I would like to add some further difficulties that I feel have received rather less attention in the literature. First choices between national parties will not always be good proxies for choices on Union issues along any one given scale of values. Schmitt and Thomassen note that ‘representation works pretty as far as general lines of policy are concerned’ but ‘congruence between voters and their representatives is remarkably poor’ on the ‘specifics’ (Schmitt and Thomassen 2000 : 319). In a further contribution (Schmitt and Thomassen 1999 ), they elaborate on where this problem is most acute. However, it seems to me that there is a further difficulty that arises not from any distinction between the general and the specific in substantive policy preferences, but from a distinction between voters in general and voters in particular. It is possible for a system to produce a good average fit between the preferences of voters and representatives, yet constitute an unsatisfactory structure of choice at the level of the individual voter.

Perhaps the key question here is: how easy is it under present arrangements for the individual voter to choose differently at the national and European levels? Take the example of left-right values. Given differences in methods used to re-allocate values – and in who is likely win or lose from any re-allocation – voters might have good reasons for being of the left in relation to one arena but of the right in relation to another. The Union is quite unlike its component states in mainly re-allocating values as a by-product of regulation (Majone 1996 ); and even where it does re-allocate through financial transfers, a member of a relatively disadvantaged sociological group in a Member State that is a net contributor to the EU’s budget might self-interestedly support redistribution in the national arena but oppose it in the European.

Of course such voters might still be able to register their preference through a national structure of choice by plumping in a European election for a domestic party other than they normally support. But by now we are assuming choice that is both guided by Union policy and sufficiently informed about the latter to match voter preferences to the nearest domestic party. If the original assumption was that choices between domestic parties allows voters to economise on the need to acquire information about the Union arena, we have departed from it.

A second reason why preferences acquired at one level of government may not always be an adequate basis for choice in relation to another has to do with the likelihood that under commonly found conditions of political competition and consensus formation more than one party will be more or less equidistant from the preferences of many voters. A sensible basis for decision under such conditions might be to assess the relative chances of parties delivering on their promises. Whether that assessment is made on the basis of past performance or of a calculation of how a party is likely to be situated in the future in relation to all others, it, once again, presupposes knowledge of the specific political system to which representatives are being elected.

My final reservation goes deeper than the other two. Even in the absence of the foregoing quibbles, it is not entirely clearly to me how much is established by the finding that the preferences of candidates and voters in European elections correlate along key dimensions of choice. As successful candidates go on to exercise the powers of the Parliament, correlated preferences may somewhat increase the probability of the Union ‘doing what the people want’. That may be desirable, but it is unclear that it corresponds to the core meaning of democracy. Given that we may, on the one hand, prefer representatives who use their own judgement and we may, on the other, find that benign technocracies satisfy our needs, it is unclear in what sense ‘doing what the people want’ is either a sufficient or necessary condition for democracy. Not only, may democracy be more valued for the rights it confers than the policy outputs it produces (Plamenatz 1973 ), but also, the right it confers on all citizens to combine together as political equals to exercise public control by dismissing political leaders is, arguably, a more secure marker of its uniqueness as a system of rule than any claim that it gives the people what they want (Dunn 2005 ).

In sum then, Schmitt and Thomassen’s findings can at best be turned into a defence of present arrangements for aggregating ‘choices of policies’. They do not justify present arrangements for aggregating ‘choices of leaders’ (and were never intended to do so). Of course, this is in good part because the powers of the EP itself do not penetrate deep into appointing or dismissing the political leadership of the EU. But limitations on how far existing representative structures can be used to exercise public control of office holders are also evident from the one instance where office is designated by competition election. As long as European elections are ‘second-order’ contests between national parties, the link between voting behaviour and the appointment or dismissal of legislators in the EP will be accidental and not systematic. Voting will be neither an evaluation of rival programmes for a forthcoming European Parliament nor an appraisal of the relative performance of parties in an outgoing European Parliament.