Instrumental Support for International Cooperation: Theory and Evidence from EU Policy Regimes
P4-03
Presented by: Giorgio Malet
The sources of public support for European integration have been the object of intense scholarly debate. While most scholars have focused on general support for the EU regime, studies of public support for specific EU policies suggest that voters’ attitudes towards the EU are diverse and multidimensional. However, we lack a theory to explain the variation in public support across different EU policy areas, although this has important implications for building domestic coalitions in favor of international cooperation. In this paper, I argue that citizens are driven by policy outcomes, and thus form an opinion on the basis of whether actions at the EU level will produce policies that are closer to their preferred policies than existing policy outcomes at the domestic level. Based on a new dataset that combines 26 Eurobarometer surveys from 1995 to 2011 with measures of policy positions for national and EU-level institutions, I leverage a within-respondent design to study variation in support for the supranational pooling of policy competences. Results confirm that domestic policy losers support the integration of policies for which the existing EU policy regime is closer to their preferred set of policies, especially in policy areas that they deem personally important. These findings link attitudes towards European integration to general theories about the centralization of power in multilevel systems and contribute to revive a rational-choice institutionalist approach to European integration.