Hostname: page-component-686fd747b7-8z4zl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-13T13:54:33.005Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Do voters want domestic politicians to scrutinize the European Union?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2021

Roman Senninger Open the ORCID record for Roman Senninger [Opens in a new window]  and
Daniel Bischof Open the ORCID record for Daniel Bischof [Opens in a new window]
Roman Senninger*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Daniel Bischof
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: rsenninger@ps.au.dk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In light of important political events that go beyond the nation state (e.g., migration, climate change, and the coronavirus pandemic), domestic politicians are increasingly pressured to scrutinize and speak out on European policy-making. This creates a potential trade-off between allocating effort to domestic and supranational affairs, respectively. We examine how citizens perceive legislator involvement in European Union (EU) politics with a pre-registered conjoint experiment in Germany. Our results show that Members of Parliament (MPs) are not disadvantaged when allocating effort to European affairs as compared to local and national affairs. In addition, voters tend to prefer MPs who engage in EU policy reform over those who do not. As demand for legislator involvement in European politics is on the rise, we provide empirical evidence that MPs can fulfill this demand without being disadvantaged by the electorate.

Keywords

European politics and integrationvoting behaviorsurvey experimentcausal inference
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , April 2023 , pp. 410 - 418
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The design of this study was pre-registered at OSF. A link to the pre-registration plan is part of the Supplementary materials.

References

European Commission (2018 a) Standard Eurobarometer 89.Google Scholar
European Commission (2018 b) Standard Eurobarometer 90.Google Scholar
Abramson, SF, Kocak, K and Magazinnik, A (2020) What Do We Learn About Voter Preferences From Conjoint Experiments? Working paper, Available at: https://www.korhankocak.com/publication/cp/CP.pdf (Retrieved online on 7 March 2021).Google Scholar
Auel, K (2007) Democratic accountability and national parliaments: redefining the impact of parliamentary scrutiny in EU affairs. European Law Journal 13, 487–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bansak, K, Hainmueller, J, Hopkins, DJ and Yamamoto, T (2021) Using Conjoint Experiments to Analyze Election Outcomes: The Central Role of the Average Marginal Component Effect (AMCE) (May 12, 2021). Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3588941.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bellamy, R (2019) A Republican Europe of States: Cosmopolitanism, Intergovernmentalism and Democracy in the EU. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, DM, Karpowitz, CF and Pope, JC (2012) A field experiment on legislators’ home styles: service versus policy. The Journal of Politics 74, 474–486.Google Scholar
De Vries, C (2018) Euroscepticism and the Future of European Integration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Vries, CE and Edwards, EE (2009) Taking Europe to its extremes: extremist parties and public Euroscepticism. Party Politics 15, 5–28.Google Scholar
Gschwend, T and Zittel, T (2015) Do constituency candidates matter in German Federal Elections? The personal vote as an interactive process. Electoral Studies 39, 338–349.Google Scholar
Hainmueller, J, Hopkins, DJ and Yamamoto, T (2014) Causal inference in conjoint analysis: understanding multidimensional choices via stated preference experiments. Political Analysis 22, 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hefftler, C, Neuhold, C, Rozenberg, O and Smith, J (2015) The Palgrave Handbook of National Parliaments and the European Union. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Hobolt, SB and Tilley, J (2014) Blaming Europe? Responsibility without Accountability in the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Leeper, TJ, Hobolt, SB and Tillye, J (2019) Measuring subgroup preferences in conjoint experiments. Political Analysis 28, 207–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meijers, MJ, Schneider, CJ and Zhelyazkova, A (2019) Dimensions of input responsiveness in the EU: actors, publics, venues. Journal of European Public Policy 26, 1724–1736.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montgomery, JM, Nyhan, B and Torres, M (2018) How conditioning on posttreatment variables can ruin your experiment and what to do about it. American Journal of Political Science 62, 760–775.Google Scholar
Rauh, C (2015) Communicating supranational governance? The salience of EU affairs in the German Bundestag, 1991–2013. European Union Politics 16, 116–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rauh, C and De Wilde, P (2018) The opposition deficit in EU accountability: evidence from over 20 years of plenary debate in four member states. European Journal of Political Research 57, 194–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmitt-Beck, R (2017) The “Alternative für Deutschland in the electorate”: between single-issue and right-wing populist party. German Politics 26, 124–148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, CJ (2019) The Responsive Union: National Elections and European Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Schneider, CJ (2020) Public Commitments as Signals of Responsiveness in the European Union. The Journal of Politics 82, 329–344.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Senninger, R (2017) Issue expansion and selective scrutiny—how opposition parties used parliamentary questions about the European Union in the national arena from 1973 to 2013. European Union Politics 18, 283–306.Google Scholar
Thomassen, J (ed) (2009) The Legitimacy of the European Union after Enlargement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tromborg, MW and Schwindt-Bayer, LA (2019) Constituent demand and district-focused legislative representation. Legislative Studies Quarterly 44, 35–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vivyan, N and Wagner, M (2016) House or home? Constituent preferences over legislator effort allocation. European Journal of Political Research 55, 81–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winzen, T (2017) Constitutional Preferences and Parliamentary Reform: Explaining National Parliaments’ Adaptation to European Integration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Senninger and Bischof Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DXEZAM
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Senninger and Bischof supplementary material

Senninger and Bischof supplementary material

Download Senninger and Bischof supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 3.2 MB