Democratic Politics in the European Parliament - By Simon Hix, Abdul G. Noury, and Gérard Roland (original) (raw)

In a time when many scholars state that parliaments are in decline in Europe, this book stresses that there is at least one parliament that is becoming more critical and independent year by year. This parliament is, in fact, the European Parliament. Contrary to what happened with the rest of the European parliaments, this supranational parliament was able, according to the authors, step by step, to become more independent and more critical as an executive body. Apparently, the crucial moment of this empowering of Parliament against the Executive and the European governments was on October 27, 2004, when it refused to elect the new European Commission proposed by José Manuel Durão Barroso. Given that the Parliament does not have the right to reject individual members of the Commission; rejection of the whole was seen as a not very palatable "nuclear option." And given that the Parliament showed determination in carrying out this option against the Commission and the European governments, the media heralded this predicament as a founding moment for democracy in Europe as a whole. But according to the authors of this book, what many commentators didn't realize was that this event was the result of a rather long development of parties and politics inside the European Parliament. Thus, they maintain that "since the first direct elections in 1979. .. [m]embers of the European Parliament had gradually fashioned a well organised and highly competitive party system at the European level" (3). Thus, the "Barroso Affair" was not a beginning but the waking up to a new reality: supranational party politics as "a key aspect of policy making in the emerging European polity" (3). This book tries to explain how all this happened by arguing that increases in the power of the European Parliament were determinant in creating supranational parties. And therefore, the authors stress that "this increase in powers had made the European Parliament look increasingly like a normal parliament with cohesive parties who compete to dominate legislative outcomes and who form coalitions with other party groups for that purpose" (3). To sustain this line of argument, the authors carried out a very impressive analysis of nearly 15,000 recorded votes by individual Members of the European JUNE BOOK REVIEWS | 641

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