Modes of government responsiveness in the European Union: Evidence from Council negotiation positions

Abstract

Are national governments responsive to citizens’ opinions when negotiating policies in the Council of the European Union? Conceiving of the Council’s policy-making space as encompassing left-right and pro-anti integration issues, I argue that governments apply different ‘modes of responsiveness’ on these issues. As left-right issues are more reliably and intensely salient in domestic elections than pro-anti integration issues, governments’ responsiveness to left-right public opinion should be more systematic than to pro-anti integration opinion. Statistical analyses of 3700 policy positions of governments in the Council demonstrate that governments highly structure their responsiveness on left-right issues according to electoral cycles and systems (‘systematic mode’). However, they only sporadically respond to public opinion on pro-anti integration issues, when parties and events trigger the public salience of integration (‘sporadic mode’).

Undermining, defusing or defending European integration? Assessing public communication of European executives in times of EU politicisation

“…To see whether politicisation is a boon or bane for further political integration in Europe, we should take the responses of different types of actors to different configurations of Euroscepticism in public opinion and in partisan competition into account. Beyond merely communicative responses, furthermore, corresponding expectations could be used to extend extant models on the actual policy responsiveness of European executives in Brussels (see, e.g., Rauh ; Toshkov ; Wratil ).…”

Territorial Representation and the Opinion–Policy Linkage: Evidence from the European Union

“…In particular, the distribution of formal power resources in the Council under QMV is much more population‐proportional than, for instance, in the U.S. Senate. Moreover, while important recent work shows that governments represent their national publics in Brussels (Hagemann, Hobolt, and Wratil ; Schneider ; Wratil ; see also Section in the supporting information), the total extent to which policymaking is driven by public opinion may still be lower in the EU than in other Western democracies, given the lower systemic salience of EU politics for national publics. This may deflate the consequences of territorial representation.…”

Representing the compromise: How institutions serve government support coalitions in European Union policy making

“…First, we include a measure of public opinion as the average ideological leftright self-placement of respondents from the Eurobarometer survey series. This ensures that the effects of the compromise position are not conflated with governments' efforts to respond to public opinion (Hagemann et al 2017;Wratil 2018; as these authors we linearly interpolate and use a six-month lag of opinion). Second, we account for a potentially relevant redistribution cleavage of rich versus poor countries with a measure of countries' annual net receipts from the EU budget (percentage of gross domestic product) (Bailer et al 2015;Zimmer et al 2005).…”