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Comment by babatong | Hacker News Reader

>He does however have to be elected to parliament via a democratic vote. Unlike the European Commission, where commissioners have no democratic mandate to speak of and yet they hold immense power.

You are incorrect. Since the Lisbon treaty at least, the commission is proposed by the council and then has to be voted on by the parliament.

If anything that gives it even more democratic legitimacy than Cameron, as in his case only he himself, not his cabinet is voted on by parliament.

You are of course within your right to criticize the parliamentary democratic system within it self. However a claim that the processes by which the commission is put in place are less democratic than the processes by which Cameron or Merkel came to power are just outright false.

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@germanier and @babatong No, you are both wrong.

The democratic mandate for EU commissioners is less strong than for directly elected officials.

@matt4077 called out that even Cameron is not elected directly as PM, and that is correct. The problems with the existing parliamentary democracy in the UK are well understood.

So having a "somewhat undemocratically elected official" Cameron, nominate a person for the commission who has not been directly elected at all by the populous, is less democratic because it is one step further removed from direct election.

This is how we have all these "unknown faces" wielding immense power in Brussels - like Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council.

The democratically elected European Parliament then vote for the nominees, but at this point the nominees already have less mandate (for reasons given above) than the members of national parliaments (and the EU parliament). And, I might add, more power.

This is one of the main problems with the EU as a political union. It is a move away from grass-roots democracy towards a centralized monolith that disenfranchises millions and millions of people.

You seem to miss that the vote in parliament adds and doesn't remove mandate from the candidates. The MEPs have a very strong opinion on who is a suitable candidate and who isn't. They used their power to refuse candidates and demand others in the past and will do so in the future.

By your standards the European Commission has a mandate that is at least as strong as the one of any European country's government.

Not at all.

The question at hand is: do the EU commissioners have a stronger or weaker democratic mandate than national MPs?

When considering this question, the vote in the EU parliament is neither here nor there, because the person being voted for by them has not been directly elected by a single member of the public, possibly ever.

If a person is directly elected by the people he represents, then he has a stronger mandate than another who has not been directly elected. Mandate gets weaker the farther you are from direct election by the people.

Comparing commissioners to national members of parliament isn't fair, they are doing completely different jobs.

A member of the European parliament is one degree removed from public vote, just as a member of a national parliament. A European commissioner is two degree removed from the public, just like a European head of government. A minister in most member states is three degrees removed.

If you don't consider the vote in the EP for commissioners as a real vote because they can't pick their own candidate then it's three degrees removed as the candidates are picked by the heads of governments.

In any case I can't see how it's less democratic than the election system of any member state. The commissioners are as far away from the public vote as almost any member of government in the member states.

Both national MPs and EU commissioners are public officials who form public policy that affects citizens' lives. In that much they are comparable. Both procedurally and in scope of effect there will be differences of course (commissioners are much more powerful, and therfore should be held to a higher level of scrutiny).

In any case, similarity of jobs is orthogonal to the narrow question - who has the stronger mandate?

Take Person A who via an elected representative would like to effect legislative change in their nation. Who has the stronger mandate to take action?

In other words, which representative would be closer to the truth in saying that "they were acting in Person A's name"?

1. For the sake of argument, let's take the UK Prime Minister. He is voted for by a party consisting of members of the public via an open process to represent a specific platform; is elected directly by a constituency numbering in the low tens of thousands of people who happen to live in a geographical area of the nation under representation.

Furthermore, the representative is a widely known public figurehead with a well-known platform meaning that although members of the public in other constituencies cannot affect his election to parliament directly, they can affect the amount of power he wields. The election covers 70 million people.

2. For an EU Commissioner a shortlist of representatives are chosen in secret by a team of people, each of whom is a proxy, elected via a process similar to (1). One of the shortlist is chosen by a vote from members of a directly elected parliament. The election takes into consideration the views of 3/4 billion people.

The EU commissioner shortlist process is secret (and thus open to nefarious influence - go on: tell me this will not happen), the final vote is diluted by the views of an order of magnitude more people, spread over a much greater geographic area (meaning a much wider range of concerns need be taken into consideration), and the commissioner need not have been elected directly by anyone from the population he represents (other than via proxy).

Based on this, it is clear that the representative in scenario (1) has a stronger claim to be said to be acting in the name of Person A than the person elected via process (2).

The EU is hence less democratic than the institutions is is replacing, and is in some sense democratically regressive.

(And this is before any discussion about the differences in the legislative path between Westminster and the EU).

I agree. Thank you for the expanded explanation of the reasons behind my above brief comment. I just note in passing with wry bemusement, that my comment that sparked such illuminating discussion apparently deserves only 0 points.

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