EU enlargement and satisfaction with democracy: a peculiar case of immiserizing growth

Abstract

Studies on EU enlargement mostly focus on its welfare-economic and much less so on its public-choice dimension. Yet, the latter may be as important as the former when it comes to sustain integration. This paper aims at filling the gap by exploring theoretically and empirically how enlargement of multi-level systems like the EU affects satisfaction with democracy . In order to assess the effects of a widening in membership, we present a novel approach that draws on the probability of being outvoted. We find that, given the institutional arrangement, enlargement tends to depress satisfaction with democracy. Our theoretical results are backed by panel-data evidence for six European economies displaying a significant decline in satisfaction with democracy with growth in EU-membership.

More ‘Europe’, less Democracy? European integration does not erode satisfaction with democracy

“…Scholars have found that European integration strengthens national identities (Polyakova and Fligstein 2016) and leads to the politicization of 'Europe' in domestic politics (Hutter and Grande 2014;Kriesi 2016). However, to the best of our knowledge, only one publication has directly tackled the question whether more 'Europe' leads citizens to grow dissatisfied with (domestic) democracy: the work of Dluhosch et al (2016). Our work has much in common with that of Dluhosch et al (2016) -who examine whether EU enlargements decrease satisfaction with democracy.…”

“…However, to the best of our knowledge, only one publication has directly tackled the question whether more 'Europe' leads citizens to grow dissatisfied with (domestic) democracy: the work of Dluhosch et al (2016). Our work has much in common with that of Dluhosch et al (2016) -who examine whether EU enlargements decrease satisfaction with democracy. These authors also rely on data from the Eurobarometer surveys to study satisfaction with democracy, and they conclude that EU enlargement has negatively affected satisfaction with democracy.…”

“…Substantively, the integration of new member states also implies that the number of veto-players increases (König 2007)-which arguably limits a single country's capacity to influence policy-making. Dluhosch et al (2016) have previously theorized about the impact of EU enlargements on satisfaction with democracy. Their core argument is that enlargements increase the odds that citizens will be 'losers' in EU-decision making, leading to frustration among the public.…”