16:50 - 18:30
P5
Room:
Room: Club B
Panel Session 5
Alessio Albarello - Who Does the European Union Represent? Evidence from Eurobarometer Survey Data
Eunhyea Oh - Mean versus Partisan Representation: Differentiating Public Opinion and Government Responsiveness in the European Union
Christoph Mikulaschek - The responsive public: How EU decisions shape public opinion on salient policies
Reto Wüest - How Does Policymaking in the European Union Respond to Stakeholder Preferences?
The responsive public: How EU decisions shape public opinion on salient policies
P5-3
Presented by: Christoph Mikulaschek
Christoph Mikulaschek
Harvard University
Do the European Union's decisions affect public opinion about electorally salient policies? Recent studies show that the EU’s policy choices have become politized in member states (Hagemann et al., 2017). Eager to avoid voters' punishment for unpopular decisions, European governments signal responsiveness to domestic electorates during negotiations in Brussels (Schneider, 2018). In contrast to the existing literature, this paper argues that EU decisions do not merely respond to public opinion. Instead, they also shape how European publics think about electorally salient policies. Specifically, the EU's adoption of a policy increases popular support for that policy. Elite cue theory leads me to expect that this effect only materializes among members of the public who trust the EU. Moreover, the adoption of a policy by a unanimous Council of the EU conveys a qualitatively different cue to the public than the Council's endorsement of the same policy despite vocal dissent, and the latter should lead to a smaller rally in support of the policy than the former. Survey experiments administered to large national samples in Germany and Austria find support for the argument that publics respond to signals conveyed from Brussels. Cues about Covid-19 economic recovery aid and refugee redistribution increase German and Austrian respondents' support of these policies by 3-7 percentage points. As expected, this average effect is driven by the much larger effect on the subset of respondents who trust the EU. Unanimous decisions trigger a bigger rally in public support than policy choices over which Council members are divided.