The European Parliament: Is It a Normal Legislature?

Abstract

Democratic Politics in the European Parliament. By Simon Hix, Abdul G. Noury, Gerard Roland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 258 pp., $91.00 cloth (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-87288-1); $31.99 paper (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-69460-5). The conventional portrait of the European Parliament is that of a weak legislative body with little political significance (Dinan 1999; Caporaso 2000; Thomson and Stokman 2006). Most analysts see the European Parliament as simply part of the larger, decades-old struggle between Brussels and the European Union's more reluctant member states. In this struggle, the Union's central organizations (the Commission, the Parliament, and the Court of Justice) fight stealthily and jointly to grab power from national governments. According to this view, the Parliament only matters because, in the fight for “more Europe,” it grants democratic legitimacy to the European Union's quest for deeper integration. In other words, it is important only because it is a way to appease European publics, who feel left behind by the integration process. Coalitions among political parties within the Parliament, whether left or right, are seen as efforts to maximize the legitimacy of regional institutions vis-a-vis their counterparts at the national level, not as authentic coalitions designed to craft public policy (Hooghe and Marks 2001; Day and Shaw 2003). The other dominant argument in EU studies sees the Parliament as simply an extension of the European Council, which is seen as the EU's primary legislative body. It is in the Council that national governments fight out policy issues, on the basis of national interest. According to this view, political groups within the European Parliament, instead of splitting along ideological lines or joining forces to get “more Europe,” will simply fragment along national lines when the European policy agenda affects their national interests (Andeweg 1995; Moravcsik 1998). In a bold response to these two camps of skeptics, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament , by Simon Hix, Abdul Noury, and Gerard Roland, offers a masterful defense of the idea that the …