Political Representation in a Multi-Level Polity: Challenger Parties Better than Mainstream at Representing Citizens in the EU?

Despite what stated in the EU treaties, political parties at European level do not ‘contribute to forming European political awareness and to expressing the will of the citizens’. Does it entail the utter failure of representative democracy at EU level? In this paper I hypothesise that, despite the poor performances of political parties at European level, European democracy is not in a bad shape. This on the basis of the growing role national parties are playing within the European Parliament (EP) arena. In this regard, research suggests that the frequency and relevance of the involvement of national parties in the EP increase as the latter gains new powers (Messmer 2003; Poguntke et al. 2007; Raunio 2007). This counterintuitive argument opens the way to a new, interesting scenario: given the still strong ties between citizens and national parties, if the latter display further interest in EP affairs, what could be inferred with respect to the gap between European citizens and European institutions? To answer to this question, we need to understand the features of the activity national parties carry out in the EP. To this aim, this work looks into the results of a series of face-to-face interviews with British and Italian MEPs, MPs and national parties’ officials. As a result, this investigation will throw light on the motivations behind national parties’ growing interest in the EP, and will contribute to our understanding of how representative democracy is evolving in the EU multi-level polity.