National parliaments and the European Union: capturing the distributive consequences of democratic intergovernmentalism

Abstract

European Parliament elections are frequently held to be insufficient for conferring democratic legitimacy on the EU’s policy process. This has led a growing number of actors to suggest that deriving legitimacy from national parliaments offers a suitable remedy for the EU’s democratic deficit, following the principles of ‘democratic intergovernmentalism’. Yet little attention has been paid to the effect such reforms might have on representation in practice. This article presents a novel way of visualising the problem by recalibrating the balance of power in the European Parliament between 2009 and 2024 to reflect the composition of national parliaments and the results of national elections. It finds that actors within the Greens/EFA group would be particularly vulnerable to a loss of influence. This raises important questions about the potential representative costs associated with democratic intergovernmentalist approaches.