%0 Journal Article
%T The European Union democratic deficit: Substantive representation in the European Parliament at the input stage
%A Miriam Sorace
%J European Union Politics
%@ 1741-2757
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/1465116517741562
%X The analysis compares voters' preferences in economic policy to political parties' economic written parliamentary questions during the 2009¨C2014 term of the European Parliament. The corpus of over 55,000 written questions was ideologically scaled via crowdsourcing. The analysis shows that parties are unresponsive to second-order and to disengaged voters. The results also suggest that there is no upper class bias in European Parliament political representation. The data highlight a strong tendency of EP7 political parties to cluster around the position of the average European voter, at the expense of their average supporter. The democratic deficit is therefore at most a pluralism deficit in the European Parliament, since substantive representation in the European Parliament is successful as far as the majoritarian norm is concerned
%K Crowdsourcing
%K democratic deficits
%K European Parliament
%K European Union
%K political representation
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1465116517741562