"The Nature of European Issues: Conceptual Clarifications and Some Empirical Evidence (S. 137-138)

Hermann Schmitt

1 Introduction

Issues are at the core of the political process.1 In a democracy at least, people need to be able to know of them and to participate in decision-making and the political deliberations about them (Dahl 1998). This paper aims at clarifying the nature of European issues. The reader might wonder why one could be concerned about this topic. However, there is a widespread misconception in much of the literature and in public discourse.

According to that, European issues are those that are ""about"" Europe. I argue, however, that European issues are all those that are subject to EU legislation, no matter whether they are about, say, the future decisionmaking rules in the European Council or unemployment. This conceptual stretch has important implications for analyses of the democratic quality of the EU political process. Perhaps a good example of such consequences is the ongoing discussion about the structure of party competition in the EU. A while ago, Andeweg (1995) proposed that a more democratic EU party system will need to become restructured so that it would represent first and foremost the ideological conflict dimension ranging from EU-enthusiastic to EU-skeptic views.

But when European issues are not just about the European Union but rather cover the whole range of issues that are under EU legislation, why then should it be advantageous for the quality of political representation in the European Parliament if the EU party system would be primarily structured along the pro-anti-Europe dimension? Those views, that have been taken up in later scholarly work (e.g. van der Eijk/Franklin/Marsh 1996, van der Eijk/Franklin 2004), somehow ignore that the EU political process does not only deal with issues about the institutional design and policy competences of the European Union but in addition and, in fact, predominantly about ""normal"" issues that are also discussed and decided upon at other layers of the multi-level system of the European Union. In the following, I will first introduce the notion of a ""public sphere"" and whether such a thing is necessary and at all possible at EU level. I will then discuss, on a conceptual level, ""the nature"" of European issues.

The two distinctions that I will introduce are between ""normal"" and ""constitutional"" issues, and between ""position"" and ""valence"" issues. I will argue that – much as in other political arenas – ""normal position"" issues are the hardest to evaluate for the citizen, while ""constitutional valence"" issues are perhaps the easiest. I will then go on and present some empirical evidence on the issues that people perceive to be important, and on the level of government at which they want them to be resolved. The data that I will present are from the European Election Study 2004. A short resume will conclude this paper.

2 A European Public Sphere?

A lot of writing and research has been done on the question of a European public sphere. The prevalent view is that if the European Union could ever aspire to become a democratic political entity, it certainly would need a common public sphere (e.g. Scharpf 1999). Why would that be the case? Because the democratic quality of a (any) political system requires that every citizen who wants to participate in a political discourse, may it be actively or passively, must be able to do so (Neidhardt 1994). "