Nine Nations Make a Law: A Comparison of the Politics of the Legislative Process for Direct Elections

Abstract

On September 20, 1976 the member states of the European Community (EC) signed the concerning the election of the representatives of the Assembly by direct universal suffrage. The signing of the act represented the culmination of a process of negotiation in the EC that had begun two decades earlier when a clause was included in the Treaty of Rome that pointed to the eventual introduction of direct elections to the European Parliament. The fact that this EC-level decision took twenty years in the making, and that a further thirtythree months-including the postponement of the original May-June 1978 target date-were to pass before the eventual implementation of the elections on June 7-10, 1979, testify to the saliency of the issues and the complexity of the decision processes in the nine member states. So also does the fact that no common electoral system was used for the first supranational election, but instead a compromise that involved a framework for the elections being defined at the EC level, and the details of each country's own electoral systems being defined at the national level.