The EC decision-making process has often been criticised for its lack of democratic legitimacy. This is frequently referred to as the democratic deficit(TM). Discuss

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Part A

 “The EC decision-making process has often been criticised for its lack of democratic legitimacy. This is frequently referred to as the ‘democratic deficit’”.

         

Discuss.         

        

There’s little in the decisions made by European Community (EC), one of the three pillars of the European Union, which doesn’t affect EU citizens’ daily lives directly or indirectly. The flipside of this ubiquitous is a popular feeling that the policy-makers are unaccountable. A widely held view is that the problem lies primarily in the weakness of the directly representative EC institutions that can be held accountable for the decisions made at the core of the legislative process. There are no participatory mechanisms that ensure EU citizens can vote those responsible for a legislative program in the EC out of office. Instead, it appears that the tripartite legislative process involving the Commission, Council, and Parliament, is that the central political choices are made by the Commission and the Council, whose members are not elected. The consociation element in European decision making remains strong. Of course, the European Parliament is a directly representative institution whose consent is required for most legislation to become effective. But with the Commission still holding a monopoly, for the most part, on the introduction of legislation, and given the political centrality of the Council in deciding issues by a super-majority, the institutional importance of Parliament is limited. Prime feature of a democratic regime is that voters can elect and are therefore able to change their government. This is not the case with the EC, therefore a democratic deficit appears as citizens can only elect members to the Parliament which itself is only one component of the EC legislative process.  

A major argument made against the democratic legitimacy of the EC is that European integration has reduced the representational qualities of European democracies by concentrating an increasing amount of decisions in what is an executive dominated political system. This position essentially argues that as the EU has increased the areas of policy in which it has a say and as the EC’s institutions are disproportionately controlled by national governments, directly in the Council, or indirectly through the nominating of Commission members. There has been a shift in power away from national parliaments towards national executives, a shift which has not been adequately compensated for by the  due to the latter’s limited powers. As might be expected, a solution to this particular problem has often been sought in increasing the Parliament’s powers to counteract this drift towards executives and compensate for the loss of parliamentary involvement at the national level.

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In condemnation of the democratic legitimacy of the EU and its decision-making process the  German Constitutional Court ruled in the case Solange I that;

“the Community still lacks a democratically legitimated parliament directly elected by general suffrage which possesses legislative powers and to which the Community organs empowered to legislate are fully responsible on a political level”.

 Stating that, it has recognised the democratic deficit in the EC. The problem of democratic deficit of the Union was predominant for the challenge of constitutionality of the Maastricht Treaty (TEU), which was the subject of the case. The complainants challenged the ...

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