Abstract
The European Union has become a contested issue amongst voters in Europe. I analyze how the increasingly salient attitudes toward European integration have affected how voters hold their governments accountable for their policy decisions at the EU-level. I argue that attitudes toward the EU have become an important source of electoral accountability that complement attitudes on the left-right dimension, but they matter differently for pro- and anti-European voters. Whereas Eurosceptic voters are likely to use their attitudes toward the EU to hold their governments accountable, pro-European voters tend to rely on their specific attitudes toward particular policies to assess the responsiveness of their politicians. The paper presents the results of a conjoint experiment in a survey of 2,540 German citizens to analyze how pro- and anti-European voters’ attitudes influence their assessment of typical signals of government responsiveness.
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Notes
This is problematic for analyzing the sources of electoral accountability for supporters of mainstream parties. If the integration dimension is not as salient to pro-European voters, as I argue here, then the correlation between the pro-European stances of mainstream parties and the pro-European attitudes of their voters may lead one to incorrectly assume that pro-European voters voted for these parties because they supported European integration even if that dimension may have been irrelevant.
Much of the discussion could also apply to electoral accountability in domestic politics. In this context, I am primarily interested in how voters hold their governments accountable when these cooperate at the EU-level.
Voters also care about the responsiveness of the policy outcomes (Mayhew 1974). I focus on responsive policy positions to keep the theoretical discussion parsimonious. Below, I provide a more in-depth discussion of different concepts of responsiveness and responsibility in the context of European governance. I test those concepts in the empirical section and the online appendix, which is available on my webpage and the Review of International Organizations’ webpage.
The left-right continuum can serve as a convenient but imperfect information short-cut when voters who do not hold salient preferences on all issues or lack information. Many EU policies are difficult to place on a left-right dimension. Focusing on specific policies allows me to analyze the patterns of accountability more directly without having to assume that voters use particular short-cuts.
I use the terms “refugee”, “immigrant”, “migrant”, and “asylum seeker” interchangeably in the text, but the survey exclusively used “immigrant” (Einwanderer) and “refugee” (Flüchtling) because these are the terms that the media tends to use and that are common in public debates. Technically, the terms refer to very different categories of people, and the concern tends to be about asylum seekers who enter the EU illegally.
The ranking was reversed randomly.
Even though it might be interesting to see whether voters respond differently to policy issues that are not politicized, I chose not to analyze this particular question for three reasons. First, it would be very difficult to model a non-politicized issue experimentally because by merely including such a policy area the experimenter would draw the respondent’s attention to the issue in a way that would not happen in reality for non-politicized issues. This could elicit a response in the experiment even though there would have been no effect outside it. Second, the theoretical mechanism requires voter awareness of the issue, and the point of the experiment is to demonstrate that in this case voters make the hypothesized inferences and choices. For this, highly politicized issues are appropriate because they guarantee such awareness. If we were to discover no connection between signals of responsiveness and voter choices here, then we would have fairly strong evidence that the mechanism has made implausible assumptions. Third, many still believe that voters do not care about signals of responsiveness at the EU level even when the issues are politicized. Instead, voters are supposed to rely largely on the government’s ideological stances to inform their electoral choices. The relevant setup here is to include ideological affinity as a control and see whether signals of responsiveness have a discernible effect anyway. As we shall see, this is exactly what the experiment does.
I compare the responses in my survey to the results of the Eurobarometer survey in Appendix C.
See Hainmueller et al. (2014) for this method. This design builds on previous experiments about political repositioning and voter behavior in American politics (Butler and Powell 2014; Van Houweling and Tomz 2016a,b; Abrajano et al. 2017). I adapted it for the European context, and added the responsiveness dimensions.
Appendix D shows a screenshot of the instructions that individuals received during the survey.
Although the uncertainty around the estimates varies somewhat (in both directions), the results are remarkably robust to the results using the forced choice question.
Another potential design would have provided direct information on the politician’s attitudes toward the EU. While appropriate, this design would have the shortcoming that it does not allow me to formally compare the two dimensions of electoral accountability. In addition, the design that I implemented better reflects actual strategies of politicians in mainstream parties in Germany who oftentimes take positions that would be considered Eurosceptic, but shy away from explicitly characterizing themselves as Eurosceptic. Party identity is only an (imperfect) short-cut for the positions that politicians take on different issues, and the focus on politicians’ positions on specific policies is therefore more appropriate. That is, I am most interested in whether voters’ attitudes on these two dimensions affects how they hold politicians accountable for the positions they take on issues decided at the European level.
Outcome Similarity allows me to control for the possibility that voters care little about input responsiveness but simply about the responsiveness of the outcome of the negotiations (output responsiveness). The variable does not take into account the influence the politician had on the outcome (his or her responsibility). In Appendix G, I demonstrate that achieving responsible outcomes successfully is another way for politicians to signal responsiveness effectively (the accountability mechanisms are very similar in this case). But even though bargaining success is significantly correlated with vote choice, it does not affect the relationship between responsive positions of politicians and vote choice as I demonstrate in Appendix K, where I estimate my main models but add the politician’s bargaining success as a control variable.
Appendix H provides results by policy. The effects are consistent but expectedly stronger for the more politicized immigration policies.
One potential concern is that approximately 17% of respondents self-identified with the Eurosceptic AfD, but the experimental setting did not allow politicians to be from that party. Since AfD voters would not identify with any politician on partisan ideology, they may be more likely to focus on signals of responsiveness, thereby biasing the effects upward. To analyze whether the findings on responsiveness signals are driven by AfD voters, I analyzed the main results without AfD supporters in Appendix L. The findings are remarkably robust.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Michael Bechtel, Jørgen Bølstad, Lawrence Broz, Pieter de Wilde, Antoaneta Dimitrova, Seth Hill, Tobias Hoffman, Martijn Huysmans, Konstantinos Matakos, Maurits Meijers, Dan Nielson, Anne Rasmussen, Christian Rauh, Ken Scheve, Gabi Spilker, Meredith Wilf, Christopher Williams, Christopher Wratil, Nikoleta Yordanova, Asya Zhelyazkova, two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their helpful comments on the paper. Abigail Vaughn provided excellent research assistance. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union and the UCSD Academic Senate.
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Schneider, C.J. Euroscepticism and government accountability in the European Union. Rev Int Organ 14, 217–238 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-019-09358-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-019-09358-w