15:00 - 16:40
P14
Room:
Room: South Room 225
Panel Session 14
Maurits Meijers - Generating Support for International Cooperation: How Parties Affect Fiscal Integration Preferences
Noam Titelman - The influence of party labels on vote choice: do candidates' characteristics matter?
Nils Jungmann - More Elections, Harder Choices? Political Sophistication and Decision Difficulty as Conditions of Candidate Voting in Concurrent Elections
Florian Foos - Negative Political Identities and Costly Political Action
Lena Masch - Talking Politics: How Participating in Political Discussions Affects Feelings of Connectedness
Generating Support for International Cooperation: How Parties Affect Fiscal Integration Preferences
P14-5
Presented by: Maurits Meijers
Maurits Meijers 1, Björn Bremer 2, Theresa Kuhn 3, Francesco Nicoli 4
1 Radboud University Nijmegen
2 Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies Cologne
3 University of Amsterdam
4 Ghent University
International cooperation is increasingly contested. While governments' efforts to deepen international integration in the past were buoyed by citizens' tacit support, the politics of international cooperation is increasingly scrutinized in the domestic arena. Driving the globalization backlash, political challengers parties have successfully politicized international cooperation across the world -- leading governments to increasingly pay attention to their constituents' preferences when negotiating at the international level. This suggests that governments and mainstream parties are at the behest of political entrepreneurs and a critical public. Yet, a broad literature on cueing effects suggests that political actors have considerable leeway to shape public preferences -- also about international cooperation. Using a pre-registered information treatment experiment in five countries, we examine the effect of in- and out-party cues about fiscal integration in the European Union (EU). The experiment was fielded at a moment in which questions pertaining to fiscal integration were highly salient (July 2020). We find that political parties have ample latitude to shape citizen preferences about far-reaching international cooperation, as both in-parties and out-parties significantly affect citizen preferences about fiscal integration. This pattern is remarkably robust across countries and across citizens with different levels of ideological commitment to the EU. We further find that both successful and unsuccessful in-party cues significantly affects citizens' certainty about their preference for international cooperation -- suggesting the importance of elite communication beyond direct persuasion.