Democratic legitimacy in EU fiscal and macroeconomic policy : an overview from parties’ manifestos

Abstract

This working paper examines the difficulty in balancing the key underlying principles of EU fiscal and macroeconomic policy in a context of growing public contestation against the so-called austerity and the lack of fiscal discipline in some EU member states. EU fiscal and macroeconomic policy aims to create a stable situation for member states of the euro area. At the same time, and given the differences in economic preferences among euro states, clashes on the definition of macroeconomic priorities are bound to appear and complicate the emergence of consensus on the legitimacy basis for these policies. RECONNECT is particularly interested in identifying possible balances between diverging policy objectives. Hence, discussing the tension between the economic governance framework and the political preference of different political actors can be useful to understand the implications for democratic legitimacy that the current economic policies may have in the medium and long run. In order to accomplish this task, this paper focusses on the degree of consistency and compatibility between the principles of the EU macroeconomic and fiscal governance framework and the principles inspiring the national manifestos to the European elections. Assuming that parties play an essential role in articulating and aggregating citizens’ preferences, the contraposition between these documents provides an excellent venue to diagnose to which extent the current governance framework is compatible with democracy in the EU. Thus, the paper first presents a theoretical discussion on the relationship between constitutionalism and democracy, focusing on the EU economic constitution. Then, it introduces an original dataset on the principles behind the EU governance framework and the parties´ manifestos for the 2014 and 2019 EP elections in five countries: Spain, Ireland, Italy, Finland and the Netherlands. Finally, it presents some empirical evidence regarding the level of consistency and compatibility between the two set of documents.