A new uniform voting system for elections to the European Parliament?

This thesis looks at the critical issue of electoral system reform relating to elections to the European Parliament. Directly elected since 1979, elections to the European Parliament operate on the basis of highly diverging national systems in the 27 member states, despite a mandate for electoral reform which should lead to a uniform system since the 1950s. The analysis of this thesis centres around the matters of legitimacy and the perceived democratic deficit, as surprisingly, there has been little or no discussion to date on the way the electoral system of elections to the European Parliament promotes or hinders the democratic legitimacy of the European Union. The European Union is conceptualised by the means of three different models, the EU as an international organisation, a supranational technocratic regime, and as a federal order. This thesis addresses the democratic deficit point by constructing an ideal type electoral system where it is currently lacking - in relation to a federal order. This research makes an interdisciplinary contribution by combining a value free positive political science on the one side and a normative legal approach on the other. Whereas a good deal of legal analysis is either explicitly based on a federal model of the European Union or implicitly premised on such an approach, detailed analysis of the implications of federalism for EU level democracy is much less common. Next to historic developments in the field of electoral reform in the European Parliament, the recent Duff Reports as well as the debates around them are analysed. The thesis concludes that an electoral system needs to generate competition between European parties on European matters and presents core elements of a draft European Elections Act, a new uniform voting system for elections to the European Parliament