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

Abstract

A key feature of federal systems is the representation of subnational units by "territorial representatives" in policymaking at the federal level. How do such arrangements influence the linkage between public opinion and policy outputs? I argue that policymaking under territorial representation should be systematically skewed toward opinion in those states where citizens care about a policy issue and have a uniform view on it. This claim is tested using a novel data set of policy change in the European Union (EU), covering 211 policy issues and 6,506 observations of opinion-policy dyads. Results show that measures weighting opinion across member states by how much national citizens care about an issue are better predictors of policy change than EU-wide mean opinion. Moreover, congruence between state-level opinion and EU-level policy becomes more likely, the more salient and clear-cut opinion in a member state is. These findings refine our understanding of the opinion-policy linkage under territorial representation.

Influence, affluence and media salience: Economic resources and lobbying influence in the European Union

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The rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU – Still an agenda-setter?

“…The most important domestic factor not yet introduced is public opinion. Although one might expect the European governments to be less concerned with public opinion when it comes to international or supranational decision-making (as the complexity of supranational institutional structures lowers national governments’ accountability), recent studies (Hagemann et al., 2017; Wratil, 2019) provide evidence of the opposite. If European integration becomes a salient issue at the domestic level, polarising the party system, then public priorities are much more reflected in the Council negotiations, usually leading to increased controversy between member states when adopting EU legislation (Hagemann et al., 2017).…”

Measuring public support for European integration from population-level data using a Bayesian IRT model

“…However, since the 1990s and the end of the "permissive consensus" (Hooghe and Marks, 2009), there has been a growing interest in understanding the impact of public opinion on the European Union's (EU) developments. Against a background of growing contestation and politicisation of the EU, public attitudes towards European integration are now central to understanding European-level policymaking (Hagemann et al, 2017;Wratil, 2019) as well as national-level party strategies (Hutter and Grande, 2014;Hoeglinger, 2016;Rauh et al, 2020). Nevertheless, the precise measurement of public attitudes towards the EU has received relatively limited attention and a wide range of measures has been employed to analyse public support for Europe without clarifying "what we actually mean when we refer to and measure support for European integration" (Hobolt and De Vries, 2016, 415).…”