Theorizing democratic practices and the European Parliament’s political groups

The struggle for democratic legitimacy is a well-known and widely discussed issue for the EU on which its fate is often thought to hang. The European Parliament is often described as the most democratic actor of the EU institutions since it is the only directly elected body. Its political groups, in turn, are key to the functioning of democracy within the EP because of the party political competition they represent. Democratic legitimacy has traditionally been conceptualised in relation to output and input legitimacy. Vivien Schmidt has added a third dimension: throughput legitimacy as the procedural quality of the policy-making processes, which ‘sits in between the input and the output, in the “black box” of governance’ (Schmidt 2020, p. 8). Such legitimacy requires the policy-making process to be democratic. Democratic practices that ensure this include participation, accountability, transparency, inclusion and equality (Schmidt 2020, p. 8). In this paper, we focus on the democratic practices, which shape interactions and power hierarchies within and between the political groups and influence policy outcomes. The research objective of this paper is to conceptualise “democratic practices” of the political groups by bridging analyses of democratic practices in political groups’ policy making (policies) and in the ways that they function (practices). The research questions that such a concept enables tackling include: How democratic are the political groups in their policy-making and in their ways of working, and which factors shape this? How are these democratic (or undemocratic) practices institutionalized in formal and informal institutions of the groups? We develop the concept of democratic practices by focusing on the multiple levels and dimensions of what the political groups are and how they work within the European Parliament, including intragroup, intergroup, intrainstitutional, interinstitutional, and extrainstitutional dynamics.