JCMS 2012 Volume 50. Number S1. pp.

18–37

Institutionalizing Representative Democracy

in the European Union: The Case of the European Parliament jcms_

2225 18..3718..37

BERTHOLD RITTBERGER
Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich

Abstract
Representative democracy has been accorded constitutional status with the entry into force of the
Lisbon Treaty. The European Parliament (EP) and the history of its empowerment embody this
constitutional principle and its gradual institutionalization. To shed light on the EP’s empowerment
and the institutionalization of the principle of representative democracy in the EU, this article
adopts a ‘domain of application’ approach. Instead of presenting rival theoretical approaches
competing for explanatory superiority, the article shows that a more comprehensive picture of the
EP’s empowerment can be obtained by distinguishing between three types of institutional choice
and associated explanations. Institutional creation, institutional change and institutional use are
introduced as different types of institutional choice, and it is argued that each type gives primacy
to particular explanatory mechanisms and dynamics to analyze the EP’s empowerment.

Introduction: The Parliamentarization of the EU

With the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the ‘Ordinary Legislative Procedure’ (OLP)
has been brought to life. The OLP is based on the co-decision procedure, which accords
the European Parliament (EP) co-equal legislative status alongside the Member State
governments represented in the Council. The introduction of the OLP also stands for a
broader trend in the history of European integration: the gradual institutionalization of
representative democracy as a constitutional principle of the EU (see Rittberger and
Schimmelfennig, 2006; Roederer-Rynning and Schimmelfennig, 2011). This principle
posits that legislative decisions in the EU require the consent of both the Council and the
EP, and hence of the representatives of the Member States as well as the peoples of the EU,
to be deemed democratically legitimate. The constitutional status of representative
democracy in the EU is also mirrored in the practice of naming. The co-equal status
accorded to the EP in the legislative process is reflected in the attribute ‘ordinary’ and
hence suggests that the EP more closely resembles a domestic parliament or chamber in
a federal system than a parliamentary assembly of an international organization. For
instance, the internal organization and politics of the EP are not fundamentally different
from those of domestic parliamentary bodies (Hix et al., 2007). Moreover, the powers it
possesses to influence EU legislation, the EU’s budget and the make-up of the Commis-
sion indicate that the EP has come a very long way since the Common Assembly of the
European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was established in 1951. Bestowed with
only few nominal powers at the outset, the EP has undergone a remarkable process of
institutional empowerment. Over the decades, its powers have increased significantly: the
© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
Institutionalizing representative democracy in the European Union 19

EP is on equal footing with the Council in deciding EU legislation (in an expanding

number of policy areas) as well as the EU’s annual budget. The EP has also come to
exercise more influence over policy-implementing measures (‘comitology’) and, in addi-
tion, it plays an increasingly important role in the investiture of the Commission and in
holding the EU’s bureaucratic centre to account (including not only the Commission, but
also the European Central Bank (ECB) and EU agencies).
How can we account for the EP’s gradual empowerment over the past six decades? This
question has been subject to a lively academic debate centring on alternative views on the
key actors, mechanisms and dynamics driving the ‘parliamentarization’ of the EU (see, for
example, Hix, 2002; Farrell and Héritier, 2003; Rittberger, 2003, 2005; Rittberger and
Schimmelfennig, 2006; Benedetto and Hix, 2007; Bürgin, 2007; Héritier, 2007; Moury,
2007; König, 2008; Schimmelfennig, 2010; Roederer-Rynning and Schimmelfennig,
2011). The purpose of this contribution is to offer a novel conceptual angle to the study of
the parliamentarization of the EU. I will argue that we obtain a more comprehensive and
informative picture on the sources and dynamics of the EP’s empowerment by adopting a
‘domain of application’ approach (see Jupille et al., 2003; Checkel, 2012). Instead of
presenting different theoretical approaches which compete for explanatory superiority, the
domain of application logic assumes that each theory has a respective domain or ‘home
turf’ where its respective explanatory power unfolds (see, for example, March and Olsen,
1998; Tannenwald, 2005). The explanatory leverage obtained with a domain of application
approach is an additive one: different theories are considered to explain different aspects of
the object under study and the ultimate objective of the domain of application approach is
to ‘bring [. . .] together each home turf in some larger picture’ (Jupille et al., 2003, p. 21).
For the ‘domain of application’ approach to yield better insights than, for example,
exercises in competitive theory testing, explanatory factors should overlap and interact as
little as possible between different domains (Checkel, 2012).
In line with the ‘domain of application’ approach, I will demonstrate that explanations
for the empowerment of the EP can be broken down into three domains characterized by
different types of institutional choices: the instigation of entirely new institutions (cre-
ation), the modification of existing institutions (change) and the routine adoption of
‘focal’ institutions by political actors (use). I will then argue that these three different
types of institutional choice point towards different sets of explanations, highlighting
different logics and mechanisms underlying the respective institutional choice processes.
For example, the use of existing institutional models tends to be activated in problematic
situations, which political actors have come to classify as recurrent and where standard
‘off the shelf’ solutions to address the problem at hand are readily available. These
solutions are based on shared understandings and taken-for-granted assumptions about the
nature of and the solution to a particular problem. Decision contexts are characterized by
very little political contestation, whether over the legitimacy, functionality or distributive
implications of a particular institution. In contrast, the creation of a new institution takes
place in a decision context fraught with uncertainty since no existing institution or
institutional alternative is considered legitimate or functional in addressing actors’ con-
cerns. The distributive implications of creating an entirely new institution tend to be more
opaque when contrasted with the modification of already existing sets of institutions with
which actors tend to be more familiar. Consequently, we expect that in contexts charac-
terized by high levels of uncertainty, actors’ preferences tend to be more malleable and
© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
20 Berthold Rittberger

more easily affected by processes of argumentation and deliberation. But once actors have
agreed on the basic institutional structure, strategic distributive bargaining is likely to
ensue over the distribution of decision-making powers.
By conceptualizing the EP’s empowerment as the result of recurrent instances of
different types of institutional choices, this contribution demonstrates that the application
of a diverse set of theories to account for different types of institutional choice offers an
additive and hence more comprehensive account of the EP’s empowerment than focusing
on separate theories. While section I introduces the three different types of institutional
choice and the associated institutional dynamics and mechanisms, sections II–IV offer, by
means of illustration, an application of the different types of institutional choice processes
to instances of the EP’s empowerment. The final section concludes with a brief discussion
on the trajectory of parliamentarization beyond the EU.

I. Institutions, Institutional Choice and the European Parliament

To capture the empowerment of the EP theoretically, modifications of its powers are
conceptualized as instances of institutional choice. The concept of ‘institutional choice’
encompasses different types of collective choices over institutions, ranging from the
creation of new institutions, changing existing ones to employing and using existing
institutional templates (focal institutions) to respond to collective action problems (see
Jupille et al., forthcoming). Before turning to these three forms of institutional choice,
some conceptual clarifications are in order. ‘Institutions’ are defined as phenomena com-
prising ‘regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements, that, together with associ-
ated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life’ (Scott, 2008, p.
48). This tripartite distinction and definition of institutions is paramount to understanding
and explaining different instances of institutional choice.

The Regulative, Normative and Cognitive Components of Institutions

Institutional economics and rational choice institutionalism in political science have
traditionally emphasized the regulative element of institutions, which points to the
enabling or constraining character of institutions qua ‘the rules of the game’ (North,
1990). Regulative processes comprise rulemaking, monitoring and sanctioning – all of
which are activities reflected in the design of institutional arrangements devised by
purposeful political actors geared towards affecting the behaviour of social and political
actors.
The normative component of institutions emphasizes the prescriptive dimension of
institutional structures as they define appropriate and normatively desirable objectives for
actors to follow and the legitimate means through which to pursue these objectives. This
normative view of institutions differs from the regulative view in that the former concep-
tualizes actors’ motivations to design, change or follow institutional rules not simply as
the result of instrumental cost–benefit calculations. Instead, it emphasizes their norm- and
value-laden content, which activates behavioural roles and defines social obligations (see
March and Olsen, 1998).
Finally, institutions possess a cultural-cognitive component. Rooted in organizational
sociology and the new institutionalism in sociology, this perspective places a premium on
© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Institutionalizing representative democracy in the European Union 21

the conceptions or representations of the world that actors have internalized and that have
become part of their repertoire of unquestioned routines and habits (see Scott, 2008,
p. 58). To explain why actors react to a particular situation by creating, modifying or
maintaining institutions, researchers have to take into account the cognitive frames that
determine actors’ subjective interpretations of the situation. These frames, often rooted
in shared cultural beliefs, determine the type of information that actors pay attention to,
how they will encode and interpret it, and what inferences they draw from it (Scott, 2008,
p. 57). Particular situations will thus trigger orthodox, habitual responses that are un-
questioned and uncontested by the actors.

Theories about Institutional Choice

This tripartite distinction of institutions is reflected in different strands of the literature on
institutional choice and design. Scholars adopting a ‘rational design’ approach stress the
regulative character of institutions: actors use, modify, create and comply with institutions
for reasons of expedience. Choices between alternative sets of institutions are hence
shaped by actors’ cost–benefit calculations. Relevant factors to account for variation in
institutional designs are, for example, the type of co-operation problem, the number of
actors involved (and hence associated transaction costs), or the level of uncertainty
(Koremenos et al., 2001). While not disputing the regulative character of institutions and
the relevance of explanatory factors associated with the rational design approach, other
scholars criticize the exclusive focus on the regulative character of institutions when
explaining institutional choices (Stone Sweet et al., 2001; Wendt, 2001; Acharya and
Johnston, 2007). Opting for a more eclectic approach, Acharya and Johnston (2007) argue
that scholars should also pay attention to actors’ ideas and identities as well as ‘history’
when accounting for institutional choices. Having become part of actors’ ‘historical
memory’, institutions often reflect normative obligations or cultural-cognitive schemes,
which either serve as normative and moral constraints or as devices through which actors
interpret the menu of legitimate or conceivable alternatives. Moreover, what may be
perceived as efficient, legitimate or appropriate institutional order today was not neces-
sarily considered an acceptable institutional solution in the past. It is through changes in
the normative environment that actors’ perceptions and assessments of the appropriate-
ness of particular sets of institutions are transformed over time (Wendt, 2001, pp. 1026–7;
Acharya and Johnston, 2007, p. 21; Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). Stone Sweet et al.
(2001) argue that crises episodes are particularly conducive to unlocking the institutional
status quo, especially when the legitimacy of the present institutional order is in question.
In situations in which the ‘old order’ is perceived to be in crisis, ‘skilled social actors’ can
exploit the situation to create new or use existing cultural frames to produce meaning for
actors in situations in which existing institutions fail to do so (Fligstein, 2001; Fligstein
and McAdam, 2011; Stone Sweet et al., 2001). Expanding the scope of theoretically
relevant factors for explaining institutional choice to include ‘history’ and ideational
factors not only reflects the conceptualization of institutions as phenomena comprising
regulative, normative and cognitive-cultural elements more adequately, it also points to
different types of causal logics and mechanisms underlying institutional choices to which
I will now turn.
© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
22 Berthold Rittberger

Mechanisms Capturing Institutional Choice Dynamics

In this section, I will introduce different types of institutional choice dynamics and
processes that actors employ to lock in or ‘institutionalize’ co-operation. These different
types of institutionalized co-operation range from the creation of new institutions, changes
or modifications to existing institutions, to the use of existing institutions to solve par-
ticular co-operation problems (Jupille et al., forthcoming). A further objective of this
section is to bring together different types of institutional choices and the action theoretic
logics and mechanisms underpinning these choices.
Institutional creation is the most ‘radical’ form of institutional choice since it involves
the creation and design of institutions in a field where none existed previously. Institu-
tional creation is most likely when new problems arise and no ‘focal’ institution is readily
available for selection or modification (Jupille et al., forthcoming). When political actors
decide to engage in the creation of novel institutions, such activity often reflects a
profound crisis or ‘substantial gaps in the institutional status quo’ (Jupille et al., forth-
coming). Explanations stressing the regulative or normative elements of institutions and
associated action theoretic mechanisms – consequential action and bargaining, on the one
hand, and arguing or deliberation, on the other – should be particularly informative to
explain processes of institutional innovation. Creating new institutions tends to be risky
and costly for the actors involved: is the new institution adequately addressing the
co-operation problem at hand? What are the stakes involved in creating a new institution?
Does it reflect or (re)distribute power as intended by its creators? Consequently, we would
expect that political actors follow an instrumental ‘logic of consequences’ when stakes are
high, actors’ ‘preferences and consequences are precise and identities or their rules are
ambiguous’ (March and Olsen, 1998, p. 952). However, when actors create new institu-
tions, the distributive implications of proposed institutions are often unclear or hard to
compute. Where actors are not able to weigh the costs and benefits of alternative options,
they ‘choose on the basis of what is normatively appropriate’ (Wendt, 2001, p. 1024). This
is most likely to occur when actors are confronted with a new situation in which existing
institutions may be perceived as normatively problematic or even illegitimate (see Olsen,
2009, pp. 14–15). Under these conditions, the search for new institutions tends to be
primarily driven ‘by an internal aspirational pressure caused by enduring gaps between
high institutional ideals and actual practices’ (Olsen, 2009, p. 15). As a consequence, in
situations in which neither the implications of preferences and expected consequences of
alternative institutional solutions nor the identities that actors activate to address the
problem at stake are clear, processes of deliberation and arguing over what constitutes the
standard of legitimacy to which a new institution should live up to and hence what
constitutes an appropriate institutional order, should be particularly prevalent.
Institutional change occurs ‘when there is an institution that is substantially but not
satisfactorily congruous with the cooperation problem at hand’ (Jupille et al., forthcom-
ing). Assessments that stress a lack of congruity may be rooted in claims that the existing
institution is ineffective or inappropriate in carrying out its designated tasks. Changing an
institution involves, for instance, revising its issue scope by expanding the competencies
accorded to political actors. Like processes of institutional creation, explanations for
institutional change highlight the regulative and normative components of institutions. If
changing existing institutions carries redistributive implications and if actors have clear

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Institutionalizing representative democracy in the European Union 23

expectations about the likely consequences of changing the rules of the game, institutional
changes tend to follow a logic of consequences and will be subject to distributive bar-
gaining among the actors involved (March and Olsen, 1998, p. 952).
Yet these processes of institutional change do not take place in a norm-free environ-
ment. This is where accounts for institutional change emphasize the normative component
of institutions. Where political actors share a common standard of legitimacy, bargaining
success is affected by argumentative and behavioural consistency with that standard.
Actors violating a shared standard of legitimacy face social sanctions, such as shaming or
shunning (Schimmelfennig, 2001). Actors, whose preferences are in sync with the pre-
vailing standard of legitimacy, may strategically employ the standard of legitimacy in
order to pursue their own ends more successfully, irrespective of whether or not they have
internalized the standard (Schimmelfennig, 2001). Other scholars emphasize the norma-
tive component of institutions by pointing to those institutional change processes that
conceptualize change as the result of norm-based argumentation and socialization and
hence a concomitant change of actor preferences (Risse, 2000; Checkel, 2005).
It is worth noting that processes of institutional creation and change highlight different
implications of the normative component of institutions: in instances of institutional
creation, actors tend to engage in deliberative and argumentative processes over the ‘right’
and ‘legitimate’ institutional order to govern a problem or solve a particular crisis (see
Blyth, 2002). Institutional creation thus tends to be a ‘creative’ and deliberative process in
the context of which actors attempt to define what constitutes a legitimate solution to the
problem at hand. Processes whereby actors modify or change existing institutions tend to
be characterized by a more stable normative environment in which standards of legitimacy
already exist. Actors with fixed preferences over institutional alternatives act expediently,
yet their behaviours are constrained by prevailing standards of legitimacy. Actors violating
the norms associated with a standard of legitimacy face social sanctions. Moreover, actors
need to defend and support their actions with reference to standards of legitimacy to act
successfully by engaging in rhetorical action (Schimmelfennig, 2001).
The third type of institutional choice discussed here is institutional use. It is the least
costly of institutional choices since it neither involves protracted negotiations over pos-
sible institutional alternatives nor the search for entirely new institutions. Instead, actors
take recourse to focal institutions, which have ‘worked well for similar problems (defined
both functionally and subjectively) in the past’ (Jupille et al., forthcoming). Focal insti-
tutions tend to be activated when the stakes involved are low and when issues that have
been addressed satisfactorily by the institution in the past resurface on the political
agenda. Processes of institutional use display the characteristics of a co-ordination game
in which the actual or perceived distributive implications of institutional choices appear to
be low to the actors involved. Since institutional use represents an institutional choice that
emphasizes ‘satisficing’ over ‘optimizing’ strategies, it can be best captured by theories
that stress those mechanisms that render institutions ‘sticky’ and emphasize institutional
continuity over radical change.
Sociological institutionalism and the new institutionalism in organizational sociology,
which highlight the cultural-cognitive components of institutions and processes of iso-
morphic change, are particularly relevant when it comes to explain instances of institu-
tional use (see DiMaggio and Powell, 1991). The legitimacy of an institution is the key
concept to capture the ‘stickiness’ or ‘focal-ness’ of existing institutions. The legitimacy
© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
24 Berthold Rittberger

of an institution rests on the perception by socio-political actors that the actions of a

particular entity are desirable or appropriate within a socially constructed belief system
(see Scott, 2008, p. 59; Suchman, 1995). The cultural-cognitive perspective on institutions
posits that an institution’s legitimacy ‘comes from conforming to a common definition of
the situation, frame of reference, or a recognizable role or structural template’ (Scott,
2008, p. 61). In sum, the lower the stakes, the higher the legitimacy and hence the more
uncontested pre-existing institutional models are, the higher the likelihood that actors use
and employ focal institutions. Table 1 summarizes the three types of institutional choice
and associated mechanisms triggering different institutional choice types and explanatory
frameworks.

II. Creating a New Institution: The Making of a Supranational Parliament

The inclusion of the Common Assembly in the Treaty establishing the ECSC provides a
clear-cut example of institutional creation: with the Common Assembly, a new institution
was designed, bringing together elected representatives from the legislatures of the six
ECSC Member States. It was bestowed with competencies to hold the newly created High
Authority (the forerunner of the Commission) to account and, if deemed necessary, the
members of the assembly could cast a censure motion. This section will focus on this
institutional innovation. I will illustrate that the creation of the Common Assembly was
driven by policy-makers’ perception that the proposed institutional arrangement for the
ECSC, the creation of the High Authority in particular, posed a significant legitimacy gap
that the delegates negotiating the Schuman Plan needed to address and redress.
The creation of the first supranational organization in the history of international
organization, the High Authority (and forerunner of the Commission), confronted the
delegates of the prospective ECSC Member States with a hitherto unprecedented insti-
tutional design problem and hence a manifest gap in the institutional status quo. Tradi-
tionally decision-making in international organizations was dominated by the principle
of sovereign equality: since national governments can ultimately exercise their uncon-
ditional right to veto decisions whenever they see their interests threatened, decision-
making in international organizations does not directly threaten to undermine national
sovereignty. It was the central aim of the Schuman Plan to overcome what Jean Monnet
and Robert Schuman considered the paralyzing effect of unanimity by establishing a
supranational body – the High Authority – whose decisions would be binding for the
prospective Member States. Absent supranational institutions in international politics,
there was not only a lack of blueprints for the creation of a supranational institution, but
also no readily available answer to the question about how and to whom such a body
should be accountable.
As a result, one central institutional design problem the delegates had to solve during
the Schuman Plan negotiations was to establish whether the problem of controlling the
High Authority was primarily about ensuring the legitimacy and appropriateness of the
new institutional structure or about preventing ‘agency loss’. Initial positions held by
the delegates on this question diverged starkly. On the one hand, the Belgian and Dutch
delegates addressed the control problem from an interest-based perspective, emphasizing
the regulative component of institutions. Approaching the new treaty organization with a
set of well-defined socio-economic preferences, the issue of control posed the following
© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 Table 1: Domains of Application: Types of Institutional Choice
Type of institutional choice Institutional creation Institutional change Institutional use

Trigger mechanisms Crisis situations (significant gaps in Gaps in status quo (modifying existing Recurrent problematic situation
status quo); novelty of the situation institutions to meet new demands) (employing focal institutions)
(lack of institutions or existing
institutions ineffective/illegitimate)
Dominant explanations Regulative: policy-seeking and Regulative: policy-seeking and Cultural-cognitive: taken-for-granted
inter-state bargaining; Normative: inter-institutional bargaining; assumptions and shared
legitimacy-seeking (deliberation) Normative: legitimacy-seeking understandings/institutional
Institutionalizing representative democracy in the European Union

(rhetorical action or socialization) isomorphism

Standard of legitimacy Content and relevance contested Application of standard contested Uncontested, ‘institutionalized’

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Empirical examples Founding of EP (Common Assembly) Redistribution of existing competencies Expansion of existing competencies (for
(for example, extension of EP’s example, new areas covered under an
legislative powers) existing legislative procedure)
Source: Author.
25
26 Berthold Rittberger

challenge: how can we best realize our preferences and prevent the High Authority from
abusing its newly acquired competencies (Duchêne, 1994, p. 210)? On the other hand, the
delegates from the other prospective Member States – most notably the delegates from
Germany – attributed lesser salience to the achievement of specific economic objectives.
These issues were secondary to considerations about how a legitimate institutional struc-
ture could be designed in the first place – that is, before the ‘details’ would be worked out.
In conceptual terms, while the Belgian and Dutch delegations followed predominantly
a logic of consequences, the German delegation followed a logic of appropriateness when
it came to discussing the institutional framework of the ECSC. For the Belgian and Dutch
delegates, supranationality was acceptable to the degree that it promised to help realize
socio-economic objectives (logic of consequences). Control mechanisms, such as an
intergovernmental council or a court, should ensure that the High Authority would not
abuse its power or turn into a ‘dictatorship of experts’ (Küsters, 1988, p. 79). For the
German delegates, supranationality did not primarily trigger a problem about control, but
– with distributive interests secondary – posed a question about democratic accountability
and legitimacy. The fusion of national sovereignties at the supranational level, mirrored in
the powers bestowed upon the High Authority, raised questions about how legitimate
political institutions should be designed to hold the supranational High Authority account-
able (logic of appropriateness).
Given the divergent positions on the question of control, how can the negotiation
dynamics and the decision to create the Common Assembly be characterized and
explained, respectively?1 Early on in the negotiations, French and German negotiators
were expressly in favour of a parliamentary organ to control the supranational High
Authority. Furthermore, the French and, more pronouncedly, the German delegations
made it known that a parliamentary assembly was an essential part of what should, in the
long term, amount to a federal-style European polity. Conversely, the Belgian and Dutch
governments, in particular, wanted national governments to retain a central role within the
new institutional structure to hold the High Authority at bay and prevent ‘agency loss’.
Interestingly, it was through the ‘federal state’ analogy, which the German delegates
pushed so ferociously to justify the creation of a supranational assembly, that an avenue
was opened for the Benelux delegates to argue successfully for the inclusion of an
intergovernmental organ: the Council. A member of the Dutch delegation pointed to the
dualistic character of federal states, arguing that: ‘Even in a federation [. . .] there is such
a thing as state’s right’.2 The federal state norm was hence a useful ideational resource for
the Belgian and Dutch governments to justify their preference for an intergovernmental
organ.3 The French and German delegates accepted the validity of this argument and some
members of the German delegation even expressed their outright enthusiasm. Delegates
accepted the inclusion of the Council thus not out of expedience, but were persuaded that
this followed logically from complying with the federal state norm, which served as a
reference point in the negotiations.4

1
The ensuing paragraphs draw from Rittberger (2005, chapter 3).
2
US Department of State, Incoming Telegram 1160, 27 June 1950, for Ambassador William T. Nunley (The Hague).
3
MAEF.DECE: Délégation française – conversations sur le Plan Schuman, réunion du Comité de Chefs de délégation sur
les questions institutionnelles, 5 August 1950.
4
See AA/PA.SFSP – 53: Notizen für Herrn von Brentano von Hallstein, 8 October 1950.

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Institutionalizing representative democracy in the European Union 27

This episode of institutional creation not only mirrors the search for appropriate and
legitimate institutional solutions. Once the delegates agreed on the principle that the
nascent ECSC could not do without a representative institution, distributive bargaining
ensued over a set of (regulative) institutional design issues – most notably the question
about the Common Assembly’s scope of power and questions about the internal organi-
zation of the assembly (for example, the number of seats per country). The ‘smaller’
Benelux countries accepted the principle of parliamentary accountability of the High
Authority only under the condition that the Common Assembly would not be able to
exercise any form of legislative or policy-influencing powers. Hence, a dose of democracy
was accepted in the form of the Common Assembly, but it should not make much of a
difference. As mentioned above, the Benelux countries held the view that in an intergov-
ernmental Council – where every Member State was supposed to have equal weight – they
could pursue or protect their interests more effectively than in a representative parliamen-
tary body.5

III. Changing Existing Institutions: The (Re-)allocation of

Decision-Making Competencies
Institutional change implies that an existing institution can be modified to meet new
problems and challenges for which the current design is deemed ineffective or inappro-
priate. In contrast to instances of institutional creation, institutional change is considered
to be less costly and accompanied with less uncertainty for the actors involved. Institu-
tional change comprises those instances whereby existing decision-making rules are
modified, as a result of which decision-making competencies and powers are being
redistributed among the key decision-making actors in the EU. Focusing on the EP,
inter-institutional bargaining is one central explanation to account for the dynamics and
outcomes of institutional change affecting the distribution of decision-making powers
between the EP and the other legislative actors – most notably the Council.
Instances of institutional change feature prominently in the literature on the EP’s
empowerment. Explanations that emphasize the regulative quality of institutions explore
those treaty-based formal rules as well as informal rules, such as inter-institutional
agreements, that confer rights and obligations on the EP and its constituent individual or
collective actors, such as MEPs and party groups. For example, legislative decision-
making procedures specify the decision-making rules and sequence that enable MEPs to
influence the content of EU legislation. Changes in these institutional rules reflect political
actors’ cost and benefit calculations, geared towards maximizing their respective prefer-
ences. Actors trigger institutional change and thus engage in redistributive bargaining if
the existing institutional rules do not meet present demands. For the Member States, this
implies that governments press for institutional change to maximize decision-making
efficiency (see, for example, Hix, 2002) or obtain policies that are closer to their respective
ideal points (see, for example, König, 2008).
For MEPs, the most worrisome gap in the institutional status quo is traditionally the
perceived lack of decision-making power that the ‘masters of treaty’ (that is, the Member

5
See AA/PA.SFSP – 63: Protokoll über die Sitzung der Vertreter der Deutschen delegation zum Europarat in Strassbourg
mit den Vertretern der deutschen Delegation für den Schumanplan in Paris, 13 October 1950.

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28 Berthold Rittberger

States) accord to the EP in decision-making. As a result, MEPs have been active in the past
in challenging treaty-based formal institutional rules and attempted, often successfully, to
impose their interpretation of the formal treaty rules onto the Member States and the
Commission, thereby unblocking the institutional status quo (see Hix, 2002; Farrell and
Héritier, 2003, 2007; Héritier, 2007; Moury, 2007). According to this line of scholarship,
the empowerment of the EP is an act of self-empowerment resulting from an asymmetric
bargaining situation in which the EP is said to possess superior bargaining over the
Member State governments in the Council. The power asymmetry has its roots primarily
in differential time horizons and the EP’s institutional capacity to effectively block the
decision-making process: while Member State governments are assumed to be concerned
about reaping publicly visible policy gains in the short run, the re-election success of
MEPs is much less dependent on their publicly displayed policy performance (given the
second-order character of EP elections). Consequently, MEPs can focus on the long-term
inter-institutional power game, threatening the Council to block legislation unless it grants
the EP more say in inter-institutional bargains by accepting to informally alter the
decision-making rules to the EP’s advantage.
In her contribution to this special issue, Adrienne Héritier demonstrates that the
process of institutional change is characterized by inter-institutional bargaining over the
allocation of decision-making powers. The actors involved follow a logic of consequences
as they possess clear expectations regarding the effects of modifying existing decision-
making rules. While the Member States who negotiated the formal treaty rules obviously
tend to prefer the continuation of the formalized institutional status quo, MEPs hold the
expectation that altering the formal treaty-based rules could enhance their influence over
policy outcomes. Consequently, they actively engage in power-based distributive bargain-
ing by interpreting the formal treaty rules to their advantage and pressing the Member
States in the Council to grant institutional concessions.
These explanations for institutional change based on inter-institutional bargaining are
less well suited to explain why Member State governments have regularly accorded new
powers to the EP in treaty reforms that have no precedent with regard to previously
conceded informal rules. Moreover, explanations for institutional change which focus on
changes to the formal treaty rules are not convincing when it comes to explaining why
Member State governments concede decision-making power to the EP by changing the
treaty rules. Since empowering the EP seems to generate neither efficiency nor policy
gains for Member State governments (see, inter alia, Schulz and König, 2000; Bräuninger
et al., 2001; König, 2008), these analyses concede that ideas and legitimating beliefs
ought to play a role in explaining the EP’s empowerment. To theorize this claim, the
normative dimension of institutions has to be highlighted (see, inter alia, Rittberger and
Schimmelfennig, 2006; Schimmelfennig, 2010; Roederer-Rynning and Schimmelfennig,
2011).
Adopting a normative perspective on institutional change has the following implica-
tions. First, demand for institutional change is triggered because of the perceived lack of
legitimacy of the existing institution and not because institutions are deemed ineffective or
actors dissatisfied with an institution’s redistributive implications. Second, an institution
is said to lack legitimacy if there is a gap between a commonly shared standard of
legitimacy and the performance of the existing institution in the light of this standard. It
has been argued that political actors in the EU are embedded in a liberal-democratic
© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Institutionalizing representative democracy in the European Union 29

community environment (Schimmelfennig, 2001). This implies that despite conflicting

views over political objectives and desired policy outcomes, actors accept liberal-
democratic values as the fundamental standards of legitimacy (see Rittberger and
Schimmelfennig, 2006). The principle of representative democracy or parliamentarism
can be subsumed under this standard of legitimacy. The principle postulates that:
assemblies of representatives elected by the people make and/or decide on the state’s laws
and budget, appoint state officials, and hold the executive accountable. According to the
system of government (parliamentary or semi-presidential), the concrete functions and
competencies of the parliament vary among the member states of the EU but parliamen-
tary legislation is a core feature of democratic systems everywhere. Legitimate laws
require parliamentary approval. (Roederer-Rynning and Schimmelfennig, 2011, p. 5)

When is the principle of representative democracy activated and when does it exercise a
compliance-pull on political actors resulting in an extension of the powers of the EP? The
condition triggering institutional change is the existence of a legitimacy gap. This gap
opens when the principle of representative democracy is undermined. When, for example,
policy-making competencies are transferred from the national to the EU level in new
policy areas, national executives tend to benefit most from these transfers of decision-
making authority (Moravcsik, 1997) at the expense of domestic parliamentary institutions.
Yet, as long as unanimity is the dominant decision-rule, traditional democratic account-
ability chains remain intact since governments continue to be accountable to their national
parliaments. As soon as national governments can be outvoted (under qualified majority
voting), national parliaments lose their ability to control Community legislation and to
hold their governments to account for supranational policies the majority does not support
(see Rittberger, 2005, pp. 46–8). Consequently, when policy-making competencies are
transferred to the EU level and the Council decides by qualified majority, political actors
can define or even scandalize such instances as highly problematic situations since the
principle of representative democracy and hence the commonly shared standard of legiti-
macy is undermined. Potentially successful solutions geared towards closing the legiti-
macy gap have to be directed at restoring the principle of representative democracy and
parliamentarism. These solutions have to pay tribute to upholding the standard of legiti-
macy, either by empowering the EP or by strengthening national parliaments (Rittberger,
2005; Rittberger and Schimmelfennig, 2006; Schimmelfennig, 2010).
This legitimacy-seeking logic has been shown to underlie institutional change pro-
cesses characterized by the extension of the EP’s legislative and budgetary powers
(Rittberger, 2005, 2006). It has been shown that actors conform to the standard of
legitimacy in order to escape the potential costs that accrue from social sanctions, which
– in a community environment with high interaction density – accrue when actors violate
the shared standard of legitimacy. Doing so would hamper their credibility as reliable
negotiating partners (Schimmelfennig, 2001; Rittberger and Schimmelfennig, 2006). In
order to escape social sanctions, actors are compelled to justify their actions in the light
of the prevailing standard of legitimacy – that is, they have to argue that the relevant
standard applies or does not apply in a particular situation. Hence, the application of a
standard of legitimacy to particular instances of institutional change may be contested and
generate disagreement among actors about whether the particular standard applies in the
context at hand. Actors whose preferences are in line with the standard of legitimacy tend
© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
30 Berthold Rittberger

to have superior bargaining power than actors whose preference cannot be easily squared
or brought into line with the standard of legitimacy argumentatively. The successful use of
arguments based on the standard of legitimacy (rhetorical action) and the concomitant
emphasis on the social obligations associated with the standard of legitimacy has been
shown to succeed in shaming recalcitrant EU Member State governments into compliance
with the principle of parliamentarism.
Successful (as well as failed) instances of institutional change, such as the extension of
the EP’s competences in the budgetary and legislative spheres, offer powerful illustrations
for this argument (see Rittberger 2005, 2006).6 When the European Community embarked
on the reform of its system of finances to establish own resources in order to ensure a
permanent financing arrangement for the common agricultural policy in the late 1960s, the
question about how the distribution of the Community’s budget should be decided came
to the forefront.7 Since budgetary competencies were partially transferred to the European
level, they escaped the sphere of influence of national legislatures. This triggered concerns
of a legitimacy deficit in the existing institutional arrangement. Government delegates and
MEPs alike, who shared an interest in extending the EP’s budgetary competencies, argued
that the decline in national parliaments’ prerogatives had to be compensated by strength-
ening the EP’s budgetary competencies. Once MEPs and government delegates – most
notably those from the Netherlands – had successfully framed the situation as one in
which a legitimacy gap was imminent, the other governments refrained from openly
voicing arguments based on self-interest, such as status- and power-related concerns.
Once all government delegations had come to accept the existence of the legitimacy gap,
they were cautious not to violate the shared standard of legitimacy that accords a central
role to the EP in budgetary decision-making. As a result, they engaged in rhetorical action.
For example, French government delegates countered arguments to extend the EP’s
powers by citing the limitations that domestic constitutions impose on the budgetary
powers of domestic legislatures. In accepting the validity of the standard of legitimacy,
recalcitrant governments were only able to limit the ‘maximalist’ agenda of MEPs and
some government delegations by employing the standard, yet they also refrained from full
opposition vis-à-vis the budgetary empowerment of the EP since this would have violated
the standard of legitimacy.
The same logic holds for the institutional change that bestowed the EP with ‘condi-
tional agenda-setting powers’ (Tsebelis, 1994) in the legislative domain.8 To overcome
opposition to the internal market and to speed up its completion, the Single European Act
introduced qualified majority voting. However, the introduction of qualified majority
voting had repercussions for the functioning of representative democracy in the Member
States. It implied that national parliaments could no longer hold their governments to
account in instances where they were outvoted. As a result, the ‘chain of democratic
accountability was thus broken and indirect democratic legitimacy suffered’ (Roederer-
Rynning and Schimmelfennig, 2011, p. 5). The legitimacy gap was scandalized not only

6
Due to space constraints, I cannot elaborate on instances whereby institutional changes to empower the EP have failed. The
attempted creation of the European Defence Community as well as of the European Political Community in the early 1950s
(Rittberger, 2006) as well as the first attempt to reform the Community’s finances in the mid-1960s are instructive in this
respect (Rittberger, 2005, pp. 116–24).
7
This section draws on Rittberger (2005, pp. 114–38).
8
This section draws on Rittberger (2005, pp. 143–72).

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Institutionalizing representative democracy in the European Union 31

by MEPs, but also by several delegates from the Member State governments who
demanded that the legislative role of the EP be extended in order to compensate for the
loss of influence experienced by domestic legislatures. In subsequent treaty reforms, the
link between qualified majority voting and the concomitant demand for empowering
the EP was confirmed (see also Roederer-Rynning and Schimmelfennig, 2011, p. 5). This
link progressively assumed the quality of a ‘logical’ link that actors increasingly took
for granted. As the following section shows, inter-state negotiations on the legislative
empowerment of the EP were no longer characterized by conflict over the distribution of
powers or contestation about the applicability of the principle of representative democracy
(qua standard of legitimacy) to particular situations. Institutional change was transformed
into institutional use.

IV. Using Existing Institutions: The Institutionalization of

Representative Democracy
Institutionalization is a process whereby existing institutional rules assume a taken-for-
granted quality and actors engage in rule-following behaviour rather than calculate the
consequences of alternative courses of action (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991, p. 19). To
capture processes of institutionalization highlighting the cultural-cognitive component of
institutions is instructive because of its emphasis on the role of shared understandings and
taken-for-granted assumptions. In an institutionalized environment, beliefs and meanings
are shared and assume a taken-for-granted status so that ‘actors both consciously and
unconsciously spread or reproduce’ (Fligstein, 2001, p. 110) this order and are either
unwilling or unable to conceptualize alternatives. Shared meanings take on a causal role
with actors assuming the status of more or less passive recipients of the meanings reflected
in institutions: actors are conceived as ‘propagators of shared meanings and followers of
scripts’ (Fligstein, 2001, p. 111). As a corollary, explanations of institutionalization place
their focus on institutional use as a dominant type of institutional choice since taken-for-
granted assumptions or shared understandings about how particular problems should be
addressed facilitate and enable joint action. As argued above, focal institutions are of
particular relevance in this context. Political actors opt for focal institutions when they
promise to offer a ‘good enough’ or ‘satisfactory solution to a new problem as compared
to [. . .] more costly and uncertain institutional alternatives’ (Jupille et al., forthcoming),
which include changing existing or creating new institutions.
Only more recently did scholarship on the EP begin to address and uncover processes
of institutional use in the context of analyzing the EP’s empowerment. Goetze and
Rittberger (2010) have attempted to show that the formula ‘no integration without repre-
sentation’ has, over time, assumed a taken-for-granted quality among political actors in
the EU. This formula stipulates that instances of further integration, such as the introduc-
tion or extension of qualified majority voting in the Council, should be accompanied by
an extension of the legislative competencies of the EP to those areas where qualified
majority voting applies. This formula proved to be hotly contested in the 1980s and early
1990s. The claim that the EP possesses a legitimate role in legislative decision-making
was all but a commonly shared view among Member State governments. The degree to
which the legitimacy of the EP as co-legislator is contested can be assessed with
reference to actors’ perceptions about the legitimacy of the EP – more concretely, the
© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
32 Berthold Rittberger

degree to which actors have to justify the appropriateness, acceptability or propriety of

expanding the EP’s powers in a particular context. The more legitimate and hence
the more institutionalized an institution becomes, the less justificatory engagement on
behalf of the proponents of EP empowerment becomes necessary. Moreover, institu-
tionalization should coincide with a high level of taken-for-grantedness, which implies
that the formula ‘no integration without representation’ requires not only little justification
but also hardly any articulation. As a result, the formula came to serve as a focal
institution, founded on an uncontested normative principle and a standard response
for political decision-makers when integration threatened to undermine the principle of
representative democracy.
Previously I argued that political actors were prompted to justify the EP’s empower-
ment in the light of the prevailing standard of legitimacy shared by the community of EU
states, which – in the case at hand – is to uphold the principle of representative democracy.
While political decision-makers did not contest the standard of legitimacy per se, there
was stark disagreement among policy-makers about the applicability of the standard to
particular contexts and situations. As Goetze and Rittberger (2010, pp. 47–8) show, the
intergovernmental conferences since Maastricht displayed relatively little contestation or
debate about the link invoked between qualified majority voting and parliamentary
co-legislation, which culminated in the adoption of the OLP in the Lisbon Treaty. The
OLP, which was introduced already in the course of the Convention process, reflects the
institutionalization of the principle of representative democracy in the EU. The principle
of parliamentary co-decision shifted from the realm of the ‘contested’ to the sphere of
the ‘ordinary’, assuming the status of an unquestioned political principle. Already in the
run-up to the Amsterdam Treaty, several Member State delegations acknowledged the
existence of a logical link between the extension of qualified majority voting and the role
of the EP as co-legislator. At the same time, this implied that the question of the extension
of the EP’s legislative powers was not about expedience or policy-seeking motivations.
Instead, a shared understanding about the legitimate functioning of the legislative process
was gradually emerging.
It was during the Convention process that the principle of EP co-legislation assumed a
taken-for-granted status. The report issued by the Convention’s working group on ‘Sim-
plification’ stipulated that ‘the logic of the co-decision procedure requires qualified-
majority voting in the Council in all cases’9 and that the co-decision procedure should also
‘become the general rule for the adoption of legislative acts’.10 This also implies that
wherever the treaty envisages the coincidence of co-decision and unanimity an ‘institu-
tional oddity’ remains, which robs the procedure of its substance and legitimacy.11
In a case study on the expansion of the EP’s powers of co-legislation to the domain of
agricultural policy-making, Roederer-Rynning and Schimmelfennig’s (2011) findings
support this argument. They show that the shift to OLP in the area of agriculture and the
implied linkage between parliamentary co-decision and qualified majority voting reflects
the aspiration of political actors in the Convention to offer a consistent response to
the principles of legal rationalization and representative democracy. The principle of

9
European Convention, CONV 424/02, p. 14.
10
European Convention, CONV 424/02, p. 15.
11
European Convention, CONV 271/02, p. 4.

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Institutionalizing representative democracy in the European Union 33

representative democracy, which obtained ‘constitutional’ status as a result of the Con-

vention process, implied that parliamentary co-decision had to be seen as a ‘matter of
principle following constitutional template for the EU polity – and not as a legitimacy-
preserving compensation for efficiency-oriented, policy-specific institutional reforms’
(Roederer-Rynning and Schimmelfennig, 2011, p. 14). The legislative formula linking
qualified majority voting to parliamentary co-decision has been transformed into a ‘tech-
nical’ and not a ‘political’ principle (Norman, 2003, p. 102), which underscores its
uncontested character and quality as a focal institution.

Conclusions: Parliamentarization beyond the EU?

As the EU’s ‘constitutional settlement’ is said to have approached a state of ‘equilibrium’
and ‘maturity’ (Moravcsik, 2007), it hardly comes as a surprise that the study of processes
of institutionalization should be instructive for our understanding of how constitutional
principles have come to be taken-for-granted features of the EU. As I have argued, in the
early decades of the EP’s existence its legitimacy was hotly contested. This was reflected
not only by often-derogatory use of the label ‘assembly’, but also by highly contested
debates over the powers it should or should not possess. In this context, proponents of the
EP have come to successfully scandalize the lack of parliamentary democracy at the EU
level and succeeded in ‘shaming’ recalcitrant policy-makers into compliance with the
principle of representative democracy at the EU level. Over the decades, representative
democracy has assumed the status of a constitutional principle in the EU, which – when
evoked – triggered less and less contestation among Member State governments. Even in
seemingly ‘hard’ cases such as economic policy co-ordination and agricultural policy-
making, with potentially far-reaching financial implications and heightened distributive
concerns on behalf of the Member State governments, introducing parliamentary
co-legislation under the OLP was not disputed on grounds of legitimacy or expediency
(Roederer-Rynning and Schimmelfennig, 2011).
The domain of application approach enables us to highlight two interesting dimensions
of the EU’s parliamentarization. The first is temporal and characterized by a process
whereby – over the course of the past decades – instances of institutional change have
been increasingly complemented by instances of institutional use. As the institutionaliza-
tion of the principle of representative democracy in the EU has progressed, instances of
institutional use have come to assume an ever more prominent role in accounting for the
EP’s empowerment. The second dimension highlights cross-sectoral dynamics. Whenever
MEPs want to reap new competencies or seek to enhance their decision-making powers at
the expense of other actors (for example, by pushing for the reform of existing decision-
making structures), we tend to encounter a process of institutional change characterized
by inter-institutional bargaining or rhetorical action. When it comes to extending existing
decision-making structures, such as the OLP, to new issue areas, the dynamics underlying
institutional use tend to dominate (see Roederer-Rynning and Schimmelfennig, 2011;
Welge and Rittberger, 2010).
One could assume that the institutionalization of representative democracy is a phe-
nomenon that is unique to the EU since no other schemes of international co-operation or
regional integration possess similar levels of supranational integration. If the descriptive
formula ‘no integration without representation’ is correct, we would expect parliamentary
© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
34 Berthold Rittberger

institutions to come to the rise in those international or regional co-operation schemes,

where governments relinquish legislative or budgetary competencies and (partially) trans-
fer these to a new level of authoritative decision-making. Yet, the transfer of sovereignty
is not a sufficient condition for parliamentarization to ensue. It also requires that political
actors come to agree that the principle of representative democracy defines a common
constitutional principle or standard of legitimacy to which all actors have to subscribe.
Only then can normative pressure be successfully exercised to compel political actors to
comply with the principle of representative democracy and its corollary, the empowerment
of a parliamentary institution at the supranational level.
These conditions seem to be largely absent in regional integration schemes beyond the
EU, where parliamentary institutions assume more or less a decorative function. Recent
research on the parliamentary dimension of Mercosur (the Southern Common Market)
demonstrates yet an additional mechanism through which international parliaments may
become gradually institutionalized: the diffusion of the European ‘model’ to other
regional contexts. While some scholars argue that Latin American integration schemes
have deliberately rejected copying the adoption of the European ‘model’ at the outset
(Dabène, 2009), there is mounting evidence that regional decision-makers have come to
emulate political objectives as well as institutional models (Lenz, forthcoming). For
example, the creation of the Mercosur Parliament (‘Parlasur’) is seen not only as a
response to re-launching Mercosur in a period of economic and political crisis, but is also
said to reflect the emerging consensus of a transgovernmental network of parliamentarians
from both the legislatures of Mercosur Member States that the parliamentary dimension
of Mercosur needs to be strengthened (Dabène, 2009; Dri, 2010). Both factors, uncer-
tainty experienced by political actors in crisis situations and networking activities that take
place among parliamentarians and civil servants, sharing a common professional outlook,
are considered to be conducive to mimetic or normative isomorphic processes (DiMaggio
and Powell, 1991). For instance, inter-parliamentary meetings and conferences between
MEPs and members of Parlasur’s precursor, the Joint Parliamentary Committee of Mer-
cosur, were organized on a regular basis and have contributed to the diffusion of the EP as
model parliament (Dri, 2010). Yet, short of substantial pooling and delegation in Merco-
sur, Parlasur looks very much like the EP in its early days, where it was merely accorded
a consultative role in legislative decision-making. Only when the members of Parlasur
obtain a critical level of legislative or budgetary competencies to effectively disrupt, delay
or even block decisions, will they be able to engage in a process of self-empowerment that
has been characteristic of instances of institutional change analyzed previously (see also
Héritier, in this issue).

Correspondence:
Berthold Rittberger
Chair for International Politics
Geschwister-Scholl-Institute
Ludwig-Maximilians-University
Oettingenstrasse 67
80538 Munich
Germany
email Berthold.Rittberger@gsi.lmu.de

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Institutionalizing representative democracy in the European Union 35

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