Chapter 3 Electoral Engineering for a European Demos: Building European Identity through Elections
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Abstract
There is a consensus among authors that the electoral system is one of the most effective instruments of political engineering (Sartori 1968; Lijphart 1995 etc.), having the capacity to generate or preclude democratic accountability, give a more important or a lesser role to ideologies, strengthening or loosening the voter-party bond (Norris 2004).
In the same time, the question whether or not a European demos exists is at the very core of the theoretical reflection on the conditions of possibility for a European democracy. The perceived democratic deficit in the EU, a topic widely debated in the 90s and at the beginning of the 2000s, has nowadays made room for the rise of different types of (national) populism all through Europe.
This chapter intends to put together those two issues, by addressing the linkage between the type of electoral system and the consolidation of a European identity necessary for the emergence of a European demos. It shows how the extraordinary diversity of the electoral procedures in the Member States has done little to consolidate the “we-feeling” (Walker 2001) of the Europeans: on the contrary. Meanwhile, the recent electoral innovations of the European electoral procedures, such as the Spitzenkandidaten, or the proposals for the reform of the ep electoral system, part of the institutional reform package of the European Commission (“A Union of Democratic Change”), such as the transnational lists and a “European constituency”, show a desire to embark upon electoral engineering with the purpose of reducing the perceived democratic deficit.