17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Katjana Gattermann
Discussant/s:
Gerald Schneider
Meeting Room I

Jan Vogler
How Do European Citizens Form Their Views of the EU Public Administration? Exploring the Role of Heuristics

Katjana Gattermann
Polity, politics or policies? Voters’ political news preferences during European Parliament election campaigns

Anastasia Ershova, Aleksandra Khokhlova, Nikoleta Yordanova
Constraining the agency to please the public: the new mode of responsiveness in the EU.

Adriana Bunea, Joe Chrisp
Participation or information? The who, what and why of the EU’s new ‘ubiquitous’ consultation regime
How Do European Citizens Form Their Views of the EU Public Administration? Exploring the Role of Heuristics
Jan Vogler
University of Virginia

Complex multi-level governance systems face a variety of challenges. As one of the most prominent multi-level administrative systems, the EU has experienced a legitimacy crisis for several years, with many citizens displaying skeptical or even hostile views of European integration in general and the EU's central bureaucracy specifically. Although citizens often hold such negative views of the EU public administration, they have almost no direct interactions with or substantive knowledge of this institution. Given these circumstances, we ask: How do individual citizens form their views of the EU bureaucracy? Our theory suggests that citizens frequently use mental shortcuts, specifically the “representativeness heuristic,” to make inferences about the EU's administrative institutions. Empirically, we focus on the case of Romania and show that perceptions of domestic central and local bureaucracies are a significant predictor of perceptions of EU bureaucracies. These findings have wide-ranging academic and practical-political implications.