ECONOMICS YEARLY REVIEW

ecutives at European level: at best, each one of them can oversee and sometimes
even direct the behavior of its own Government, with reference to how it
was able to pursue the national interest, but obviously it is not in any position to
do the same thing at European level, checking whether or not the policies envisaged
or enacted have actually achieved the European interest.
The analytical tool that has recently been proposed in this regard, in order
to better grasp these peculiar features of EU democracy, and eventually to
stimulate their evolution, is the “Euro-national parliamentary system” 4 . It assumes
that the EU democracy is founded and characterized not only on the directly
elected European Parliament, but also on the confidence relationships
that, with the only exception of Cyprus, link each National Government to its
Parliament (or with at least one Chamber thereof). Consequently, it tends to
underline the relevance for EU democracy of the relationship between each National
Parliament and its respective Government, explicitly acknowledged by article
10 TEU, when it states, after recognizing that the EU is founded on representative
democracy and after recalling the role of the European Parliament,
that “Member States are represented in the European Council by their Heads of
State or Government and in the Council by their governments, themselves democratically
accountable either to their national Parliaments, or to their citizens”
5 .
In comparison to other widespread analytical tools, like the one of the
“multilevel parliamentary field” 6 , which has become remarkably widespread in
4 See MANZELLA – LUPO (eds.), Il sistema parlamentare euro-nazionale. Lezioni, Torino,
Giappichelli, 2014; LUPO, Parlamento europeo e Parlamenti nazionali nella Costituzione
“composita” dell’UE: le diverse letture possibili, in CIANCIO (ed.), Nuove strategie per lo
sviluppo democratico e l’integrazione politica in Europa, Roma, Aracne, 2014, 365 ff.;
MANZELLA, Parlamento europeo e parlamenti nazionali come sistema, in Rivista AIC, 1,
2015, www.rivistaaic.it/parlamento-europeo-e-parlamenti-nazionali-come-sistema.html.
5 On this point GRIGLIO – LUPO, Parliamentary Democracy and the Eurozone Crisis, in Law
And Economics Yearly Review, 2012, 314.
6 See CRUM – FOSSUM, The Multilevel Parliamentary Field: a framework for theorizing
representative democracy in the EU, in European Political Science Review, 1, 2009, 249.
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