6.2 Constraint

A second question that requires more research is: what constrains parties from developing further as a means of aggregating preferences in the European arena? One possibility is that further development is blocked by incumbents. Another is that there is little obvious need for anything more than we have already. These hypotheses are best deployed as alternative explanations for why European Union parties have not developed in the electoral arena.

Incumbent national parties have been accused of operating mutually reinforcing restraints on competition in European elections and the EP itself. In Pascal Delwit’s assessment, national party campaigns in European elections are so low-key that it is ‘possible to question whether there has been an election at all’ (Delwit 2000 : 310). Stefano Bartolini argues that it is only on account of this depoliticisation of the process by which the Parliament is elected that its groups can operate as efficiently as they do to form legislative coalitions (Bartolini 2006 : 45). Still others argue that collusive voting amongst MEPs then feeds back into muted competition in European elections. As one of its recent Presidents puts it, the Parliament is yet to ‘demonstrate to voters that preferring one set of candidates to another will change policy outcomes at the European level’(ELDR 1999 ).

So what alternatives to the status quo might stimulate greater competition that is also more clearly structured around EU issues? Suggestions include the following: a) allocation of some EP seats at the European Union level (10 per cent has been suggested) b) strengthened linkage between European elections and the appointment of the Commission c) open lists for European elections d) encouragement of national parties to clarify their relationship with the EU party system (for example, by indicating their EU party affiliations, and not just their national party names, on ballot sheets).

Given that incumbent parties can probably block all these changes through their influence over the EU Treaties and national electoral procedures, the key question then becomes: what interest do they have in change? Suspicion that present arrangements suit them well centres on the observation that, as long as European elections are second order, MEPs have no special incentive to follow the preferences of their electorate. MEPs’ chances of re-elections are conditioned by the domestic political cycle and not by any actions of their own. Yet, they do have reason to follow the preferences of their ‘ $s$ electorate’. As seen, it is national parties who reward or sanction their careers.

If this interpretation is correct, national parties will be able to extract rents from the operation of the EU’s political system to the extent that they can substitute a predictable carve-up of the offices and policy outputs of the European Parliament for the full adjustment of either to voter choice (Katz and Mair 1995 ). To continue with the analogy of imperfect markets, they may be able to use low politicisation and muted competition to divert some of the ‘surplus’ of the EU political system from satisfying voter wants to pursuing their own goals.

Yet there are difficulties with the claim that national parties constrain the competitive emergence of improved means of linking voters to the EU arena. First, Raunio’s survey shows that only 8.5 per cent of national parties regularly instruct their MEPs; a further 32.2 per cent only instruct on matters of ‘fundamental importance’; and 47.7 per cent never instruct (Raunio 2002 ). This implies that rent-seeking at worst works through MEPs of their own volition, anticipating the views of their national parties more than those of their voters. It hardly ever takes the form of a closely monitored principal-agent relationship between national parties and MEPs.

Second, it is unclear that the status quo really is a source of unalloyed benefit to national parties. Precisely because European elections are to some degree ‘second-order’, they have since 1979 been associated with ‘shocks’ to parties and party systems in several Member States, whose effects have included party leadership changes, strains in multiparty coalitions, splits within parties and surges of support for anti-system parties. Rudy Andeweg (Andeweg 1995 ) has thus questioned whether national parties might not, in fact, benefit from new ways of structuring voter choice in European elections, which would reduce spill-backs to domestic political competition.

What, then, of the alternative hypothesis that there may simply be little voter demand for parties to structure choice differently in European elections? As Peter Mair argues (Mair 2005 ), publics are most likely to find parties useful as a means of linking them to a political system where choices are ‘framed primarily in normative or ideological terms, or where there are equally valid competing and potentially irreconcilable demands’. For reasons of both its policy portfolio and its institutional structure, the Union is unlikely to crystallise conflict around large-scale ideological choices, except, perhaps through Treaty changes, which are largely decided outside the operation of its day-to-day political system.

One suggestion is that the Union even approximates to a ‘pareto-improving’ polity. With decision-rules that require high levels of consensus, limited legitimacy of its own and high levels of dependence on the active co-operation of its Member States and sometimes other stakeholders too, the EU can only operate effectively by ensuring that its overall policy portfolio leaves a wide range of participating actors as well off in terms of their own preferences as they would be in the absence of Union-level co-operation. Even if pareto-improvements are not always evident in relation to single issues, they are established by implicit and explicit vote- and veto-trading between issues. Even if Union law has binding force, its disciplines are ultimately grounded in a need to overcome particular kinds of co-ordination and collective action problems (incomplete contracting, asymmetric information, non-simultaneous delivery of commitments and time inconsistency) involved in the realisation of individual preferences.

Yet if their reallocations of value are ultimately traceable to voluntary bargaining within an overall context of consensus and pareto-improvement, the operation of Union institutions is unlikely to provoke the significant and durable cleavages in wider society that may be needed to sustain the role of parties in aggregating issues around broadly conceived ideological or normative alternatives. Moreover, the structure of voter choice in European elections only conforms to the overall pattern of avoiding single ideologically-charged ‘moments’ when a great deal could change. Not only are European elections largely limited in their implications to a choice of one half of one branch of government (the legislature), but the Parliament’s participation in reallocations of value are necessarily incremental. As Amie Kreppel puts it (Kreppel 2000 ), the EP is only likely to succeed as a Co-legislator where it proposes ‘moderate’ amendments in relation to the preferences of the Council and the Commission.

Even if there were net long-run benefits to society in restructuring choice in European elections around pan-European parties competing on EU-relevant issues, Mancur Olson (Olson 1965 ) reminds us that we would only expect new modes of political organisation to develop where the marginal returns from innovation exceed marginal costs. In a political system where decisions are dispersed, consensual, incremental and only mildly re-allocative of values, it is unlikely that the marginal return of inventing different parties to fight elections for any one five-year European Parliament would exceed the marginal risk and cost of fielding pan-European parties with little voter recognition. It is still less likely that the marginal return from change would exceed the marginal cost if Schmitt and Thomassen are correct that, for all their shortcomings noted above, present arrangements already provide a rough-and-ready form of policy aggregation along key dimensions of choice. As for those who are closely affected by reallocations of value through Union institutions, they may find that calculations of marginal cost and benefit point to participation through policy-specific networks, rather than to supporting the emergence of ‘general-interest’ organisations such as electoral parties structured around Union issues (Magnette 2000 ).