What is it about the United States that makes its politics so exciting to us? Is it the shared language? Is it the vast amounts of money and influence at play? Or is it just the sheen of "West Wing"-esque celebrity that just makes it more attractive than the varieties closer to home?

It is an issue well worth pondering as it relates to the UK and Scotland's place in Europe. Why should it be that EU politics should be too distant, too complicated, too bureaucratic, too far removed from daily life - and yet the results of the Iowa caucus are a matter of headline news? Ponder too as to why such a huge amount of media resources are spent covering an election and its primaries, the result of which will affect our foreign and trade relations, but will not substantially alter our daily life.

Compare that to the role of the European Union, and your directly elected Members of the European Parliament. Admittedly they don't influence every aspect of your daily life – despite what some commentators would have us believe. But the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, the hours you work, and ultimately the usefulness and transferability of the subjects you study, are the day-to-day matter of EU legislation – as are more immediate concerns such as mobile phone costs. That legislation is decided upon by MEPs who rely on the vote of EU citizens for their mandate – albeit that over 50 per cent of EU voters chose not to exercise it in 2004, at the last time of asking.

And yet the names of those MEPs remain an unknown quantity to many voters and tax-payers in Scotland, who are nevertheless well versed in Joe the Plumber and Bristol Palin. This sin of ignorance is often put down to impotence – that Scotland's voters exercise no real control over their third Parliament. But in most cases, the European Parliament democratic deficit is as much a matter of perception as reality – it seems undemocratic, therefore it is.

There are several entirely reasonable justifications for this, most of which stem from the human impulse to compare like with like – think of representations of scale in terms of football pitches or double decker buses. But the EU's parliament can no more easily be compared to a national or sub-national one than the EU can be compared to a nation state. The European Parliament is not a full sovereign parliament, and appears to have little realistic aspiration of becoming one; just as the heady days of EU state-building—if they were ever with us—have died out with the expansion of the EU to the east and with the overblown and unsuccessful EU Constitution.

The European Parliament is an odd-man-out in many ways. It works—in written and spoken word—in 23 different languages. This cumbersome and expensive tradition is not so much born of the joys of linguistic diversity, but from the realistic expectation of voters and tax-payers that their elected assembly should be accessible to them in their own national tongue. But the colour and range that those languages bring do little to lower barriers of public awareness. Simultaneous translation is rarely the mother of the most inspiring or lofty political discourse, and parliamentary jokes and barbs are literally lost in translation.

The Parliament is unique in another respect, namely that its powers and responsibilities change depending on what it is discussing. The member states' governments have passed the Parliament full decision-making powers—in co-operation with those governments—on all the main areas that make up the internal social and economic market of the EU's 27 member states. Consider environmental levels, workplace standards, free movement of people and qualifications – in short, the rules of Europe's level playing field. However, on the really big budget issues, agriculture and funding to more deprived regions, the Parliament does not have full line-by-line budgetary control (and will not, as long as the Lisbon Treaty remains encased in the ice of its rejection by Ireland).

Last but not least, public opinion of the Parliament's effectiveness and worth is damaged by a string of unfavourable articles about MEP's pay and allowances and the Parliament's curious habit of shuttling between Brussels and Strasbourg – where most of the formal votes take place. As it happens, MEPs are currently paid no more than their own national equivalents, and the allowances for work and for assistants have all been the result of substantial recent reform, which will kick in after the 2009 election. The Strasbourg "question" is one for the member states to answer, as they decided on the co-location in the first place. It is fair to say that the monthly pilgrimage hardly chimes well in these carbon cautious days.

That all being said, the Parliament still does what parliaments do. It scrutinises and legislates. It supervises the work and appointments of the other EU institutions. It has the final say on the shape and approval of the overall EU budget. But on a crowded field, where Scottish voters have 129 MSPs, 59 MPs and 1222 local councillors to reach the ever-reducing variety of mainstream media outlets, 7 MEPs are always going to struggle to have their voices heard (and this is despite funding existing to defray the costs of journalists who may wish to cover Strasbourg in person).

So the deficit that Europe's elected members suffer from is more one of perception and process than of basic structure. The avenues for democratic engagement exist, they are just hard to find on the complicated road-map of 21st century participative democracy. But next time you fret abut the political balance of the US Supreme Court, or the shift on polls in Florida, or the executive power of Dick Cheney, pause for thought, and wonder why it is that you fret so much less about the European institutions that you can actually do something about. And try and do so before polls open on 4 June 2009.