According to the Treaty of Lisbon, the political component of European citizenship in the first place concerns the right of every citizen ‘to participate in the democratic life of the Union’. This chapter describes whether, and if so how, the main Europarties and their Dutch member parties have promoted an effective democratic European institutional framework in which European citizens were or may have been able to meaningfully participate in and effectively control the European decision-making process. Proposals regarding the European political institutional system have been identified in the election programmes of the Europarties and Dutch parties for the European elections from 1979–2014, and analysed within the framework of a synchronic and diachronic comparison.
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