Abstract
In this article we study the ‘institutionalization’ of the European Parliament (EP), analysing those processes whereby the EP and its role in the EU's institutional setting acquire legitimacy and are increasingly taken for granted by political actors. In order to both explain the process of institutionalization and to understand why granting the EP more powers has become the EU's standard response to eliminate the (alleged) democratic deficit, we argue that a sociological perspective is necessary. In particular, only when we relate the evolution of the EP to its perceived legitimacy among EU member states, can we begin to better grasp the process of its empowerment. To that effect, we discuss the concept of legitimacy and conceive of it as an inter-subjective property that, nevertheless, operates through individuals via cognitive scripts. We then empirically demonstrate that the legitimacy of the EP did change over the course of its existence. Whereas until the early 1990s, categorical opposition to extend the powers of the EP was commonplace and several governments drew symbolic boundaries between the EP and national legislatures, the value of these indicators of legitimacy had fundamentally changed by the mid-late 1990s. We therefore suggest to perceive of the more recent episodes of empowering the EP as common habitual responses triggered by a recurring challenge rather than explicit calculations based on instrumental rationality.
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Notes
See also Deephouse and Suchman (2008), Johnson et al (2006), and Colyvas and Powell (2006) for similar definitions.
In the context of this article, when talking about cultural beliefs, we refer only to a sub-set of beliefs within a cultural realm: political beliefs, that is beliefs about the appropriate goals, means and resources of political institutions. Members of the EU constitute the community to which these beliefs refer.
An everyday example shall suffice to illustrate the concept of ‘script’: behaviour associated with eating in a restaurant. Having entered a restaurant with table service, the typical activities – seating, selecting food, eating food, paying the bill – correspond to nodes of the restaurant script and one's actions after in the restaurant will be guided by these nodes. (example taken from Nooteboom, 2007, p. 167).
The earlier example of the restaurant script (see note 3) will also help to illustrate the indeterminate nature of scripts. Within constraints imposed by connections between nodes, a node allows for different forms of action. When paying the bill in a restaurant, for example, the script allows for different strategies to accomplish this goal. So, both the use of cash or credit cards would be principally permissible means of action. For a more detailed discussion of the characteristics of scripts and for references to the relevant literature in psychology, see Nooteboom (2007, pp. 167–169) and DiMaggio (1997).
The attention paid by sociologists to cognitive biases in decision-making parallels, of course, some of the issues motivating the research programme of behavioural economics (see Kahneman, 2003).
Our attempt to operationalize legitimacy of the EP has been substantially inspired from Colyvas and Powell's work on the legitimacy of the commercial applications of science and the associated transformation of US universities over time (see Colyvas and Powell, 2006, 2007).
Regarding the carriers of discourse, our main focus is on national governments and government delegations to IGCs. Previous research has demonstrated that demands for empowering the EP by ‘interested’ actors, most notably Members of the European Parliament (MEP) themselves, has been inconsequential: Demands for increases in the EP's powers have been recurrent, yet in the decisions made by governments during IGCs and the justifications of these decisions, no systematic evidence has been provided that MEPs or other actors have neither been successful ‘norm entrepreneurs’ (see Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998, p. 897) nor have they successfully framed the debate on enhancing the prerogatives of the EP (Rittberger, 2005). Moreover, we can find that in the early decades of the EP's existence, demands by MEPs even proved counterproductive (see Rittberger, 2006).
The lack of fundamental opposition, however, does not mean the end of politics with regard to the EP. But as predicted by the concept of legitimacy, the political fights now centred around the scope of the EP's influence within the legislative process or on the exact scope to which QMV should be extended to new policy areas.
But this was not because individual governments had ceased to perceive democratic legitimacy as resting in national parliaments. Rather, as John Major writes in his memoirs, governments did not dare to publicly voice criticism against the expansion of the EP's powers (Major, 2000, p. 270).
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Goetze, S., Rittberger, B. A matter of habit? The sociological foundations of empowering the European Parliament. Comp Eur Polit 8, 37–54 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2010.3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2010.3