Apathy and EU parliamentary elections Posted by Max Bergmann

There is a lot of concern over public apathy over European Parliamentary elections. Many worry that this is another signal of Europe's growing "democratic deficit" and another indication of its struggles. This is true. But ask yourself: Do you care about state house elections? Or if you are in DC your Ward elections? You should, I tend to, but many people don't, despite the fact that state legislatures have tremendous power and influence over peoples lives. Voter turnout for these elections in the U.S. - particularly when they don't correspond with voting dates for national elections - is often abysmally low. Yet in the United States we don't constantly debate whether these bodies are important or not and few sane-people argue that they should be scrapped. Unfortunately, that is not the case in Europe, making public apathy a much bigger problem.

While European apathy has grown toward the EU, the European Parliament - often seen as merely a place to give long speeches - has become much more substantively important. My old professor Simon Hix, who is at the forefront of studying the European Parliament and Europe's emerging political system explains that:

The European Parliament is now a very powerful legislative body. The EU passes many laws which affect our daily lives, and most of these laws are amended and passed by the European Parliament. The European Parliament also influences how our taxes are spent in Brussels, and plays a role in the election of the European Commission - the EU executive...So, European Parliament elections matter... Most voters in Europe care about these policy choices, yet they are not presented with them in European elections. This is because national parties have an incentive to treat these elections as national contests. For example, the Conservatives will try more to embarrass the Labour government, rather than to win more seats in the European Parliament.

The current public focus of politics in Europe is the nation-state, since that is after all what the national press cover - and it is probably somewhat inevitable that these elections will be reflective of the national politics of individual states for a while. Popular interest in the confusing political system of the EU is also likely to be much less for some time to come, since a higher levels of apathy and disinterest are somewhat inevitable in Europe's large multi-layered political system. Just as public interest in the federal level in the U.S. maybe higher than the state or local levels, in Europe the nation-state will draw more interest than the supra-national level. The problem however with European apathy is not so much in how it affects the actual European parliament - as Yglesias notes, when the MEPs get into office they act like legislaters - but in how it impacts the European project as a whole.

Europe's movement toward a more federal union is incomplete and currently stalling.While public apathy is not good no matter where you are, this is a particularly acute problem because for a more cohesive Europe to emerge it will continue to need to evolve and strenghten its federal political system, which will require public support.  European apathy and disinterest has been a real obstacle to efforts to streamline the EU, as seen by the inability to push through a new constituion or the Lisbon treaty. So while I don't think public apathy is neccessarily that huge of an institutional flaw within the EU on its own, Yglesias is dead on then when he worries about the implications of the EU's inability to fix its institutional flaws:

I increasingly worry that the fairly problematic institutional framework that governs the European Union is going to be a problem for all of us. Without anyone really digesting this information, over the past 10-15 years the United States has been eclipsed by the EU as the world’s most significant economic actor. But the EU in various ways lacks the capacity and legitimacy needed to respond in a forceful way...It’s pretty conventional in American punditry to write about the indispensability of American leadership. But normally the point is that we’re indispensable because we’re so damn big. Now it’s more like we’re indispensable because even though we’re only second-biggest, the other guys can’t really do anything. It’s not a good situation.

 

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