Mediatized representative politics in the European Union: towards audience democracy?

Unlike the institutional and constitutional set-up of the compound system of EU political representation, the politicized and mass-mediated aspects of EU representative politics have only recently started to receive scholarly attention. In this contribution, we argue for a reconceptualization of EU political representation as a triadic and mediatized communicative act between political agents, constituents and the audience. We then apply the notion of ‘audience democracy’ to the representative politics of the EU, which after decades of operation within the parliamentary and political party spheres with the ‘permissive consensus’ of its citizens, are in the last few years increasingly and decisively carried out in the (mediatized) public sphere. Last but not least, we discuss the role of ‘audience democracy’ in constraining or enriching the democratic legitimacy of the EU.