First draft, please do not cite without permission of the authors.

This paper deals with political representation in European Union (EU) politics. Specifically, it explores the triangular linkage between EU public policy, citizens’ preferences and party positions regarding policy-making at the EU level. We address two central questions: First, to what degree do citizens and parties hold congruent opinions about the extent and content of EU legislation? Secondly, does the extent and content of EU legislation reflect the policy preferences of citizens and parties? In our paper we employ public opinion data from Eurobarometer surveys, expert data on party positions, and information about EU legislation from the Official Journal of the EU. Our paper has two main findings. First we show that citizens and party elites do appear to agree on the overall extent of EU policy-making. Aggregate public opinion and party positions track quite strongly with the aggregate level of EU legislation. Second, we find, nevertheless, much less of a congruence when we focus on the specific content of EU legislation that is on EU legislation in specific policy areas. Citizens ’ and parties’ policy preferences for EU legislation in specific policy areas are not closely mirrored by the enacted EU legislation in those very same policy areas. Consequently, this study provides a mixed assessment of the extent of political representation in EU politics. While citizens ’ and parties ’ preferences do not appear to provide much of political guidance for EU legislation in particular policy areas, they do appear to play a role as far as the overall volume of EU legislation is concerned