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Is the Member States' Curse the EU's Blessing? Inequality and EU Regime Evaluation
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How does inequality shape regime evaluations in Europe’s multi-level governance system? I argue that rising inequality improves citizens’ evaluation of the EU’s political system. This effect is driven by two mechanisms. First, adverse social and political consequences of inequality within national democracies strongly erode national regime evaluations. This leads to an improvement of EU regime evaluations in relative terms. Second, citizens compensate negative national conditions by redirecting hopes to the supranational level. This compensation mechanisms further tilts regime evaluates in favor of the EU. An empirical analysis of change in national and European parliament trust across 27 member states and 14 years provides empirical support for this argument. It also shows that the two mechanisms coexist and that their relevance is conditioned by previous levels of regime support.
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... Recent studies show that apart from the increased emigration greater inequality diminishes people's confidence in a fair, equal opportunity society and weakens the sense of community. Greater inequality also has a negative impact on the economy through lower productivity, efficiency, growth and greater instability (Almeida, 2020;Marchand et al., 2020;Schraff, 2020). Lower economic growth has been demonstrated by analysing data from many countries over the long term (Stiglitz, 2013). ...
Purpose – The objective of the article is to analyse how income inequality affects population decisions on emigration.
Research methodology – Correlation and regression analysis are used to determine the relationship between the analysed social phenomena. Firstly, the correlation between income inequality (its change) and emigration rates is calculated. Secondly, the static and dynamic aspect is evaluated, as well as the influence of data delay (lag) on decision-making. Finally, a regression equation is constructed, showing how one variable affects the other.
Findings – The analysis identifies the conditions and severity of population income inequality that may influence their emigration decisions. On the one hand, the impact is more substantial in the crisis and post-crisis period, and, on the other, in the new EU member states.
Research limitations – Sensibility of emigration to different conditions like accessibility (i.e. the opportunity to emigrate freely, such as being a member of the Schengen area) and the income gap between countries of origin and destination is a major limitation of the article which should be examined more closely in later works.
Practical implications – The analysis of emigration problem and the identification of its possible links with income inequality would allow economists to assess a priori potential of various measures suggested in practice and, consequently, would allow for the more targeted formulation of the State economic policy.
Originality/Value – The novelty of the article is defined by insufficient scientific research of relationships between income inequality and emigration as socio-economic phenomena within the new EU member states. A scientific analysis of the problem of emigration and the identification of its possible links with income inequality would contribute to a more detailed study of the scientific aspects of emigration and income inequality.
How did the Eurozone bailouts affect national democracies? Recent research indicates strong citizen detachment due to the external constraints imposed by bailout programs on national autonomy. This paper re-examines the detachment thesis by broadening the view towards multiple dimensions of democracy and effect heterogeneity across time and space. Using the generalized synthetic control method, we find a negative effect of bailouts on satisfaction with democracy and turnout, but show that effects vanish after several years and vary strongly across bailout cases. In addition, we find resilient attitudes and behaviors in spite of national democratic institutions that continue to deteriorate. These findings indicate that economic policy outcomes have a stronger influence on satisfaction with democracy and electoral turnout than the quality of the democratic process.
We introduce the revised version of the KOF Globalisation Index, a composite index measuring globalization for every country in the world along the economic, social and political dimension. The original index was introduced by Dreher (Applied Economics, 38(10):1091–1110, 2006) and updated in Dreher et al. (2008). This second revision of the index distinguishes between de facto and de jure measures along the different dimensions of globalization. We also disentangle trade and financial globalization within the economic dimension of globalization and use time-varying weighting of the variables. The new index is based on 43 instead of 23 variables in the previous version. Following Dreher (Applied Economics, 38(10):1091–1110, 2006), we use the new index to examine the effect of globalization on economic growth. The results suggest that de facto and de jure globalization influence economic growth differently. Future research should use the new KOF Globalisation Index to re-examine other important consequences of globalization and why globalization was proceeding rapidly in some countries, such as South Korea, but less so in others. The KOF Globalisation Index can be downloaded from http://www.kof.ethz.ch/globalisation/.
Academic and general interest in public support for European Integration is on the rise. Theoretically, the utilitarian, identity, reference, cue-taking and signalling models have been developed to explain this perplexing phenomenon. While these models have been tested, there is no comprehensive up-to-date account of how well they perform separately, relative to each other and across levels. Empirically, this study utilises a data set with 110,873 respondents from the European Social Survey. Methodologically, a multilevel model is used to address causal heterogeneity between levels. The study shows that ‘attitudes towards multiculturalism’ at the individual level and ‘corruption’ at the country level are the strongest predictors. When interacting levels within models, it is demonstrated that individual trust in the national political establishment is being moderated by the level of corruption in a country in influencing support for European integration. On this basis, two models are proposed, named the ‘saviour model’ and the ‘anti-establishment model’. © 2019
Existing research highlights the roles of group identities and concerns about mass migration in explaining attitudes towards the European Union (EU). However, studies have been largely silent on whether EU attitudes are also shaped by people’s attitudes towards the principles and practices of supranational governance. This research provides a first test of the nature and role of supranational attitudes. We introduce a new measure of supranationalism and, in two studies using samples drawn from the British population, test the psychometric properties of the supranationalism scale. We then identify the socio-ideological correlates (right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation) of supranationalism, along with its effects in predicting EU attitudes and post-Brexit preferences. Our core finding is that supranationalism predicts attitudes towards the EU over and above established factors such as national identity and immigrant threat. Our study thus shows the existence of supranational attitudes among individuals, and the relevance of such attitudes to people’s opinions about international organisations like the EU.
Does low-wage work lead to political alienation? Even though low-wage sectors have grown in the advanced industrialized world, empirical evidence so far is sparse. This paper uses household panel data to investigate the effect of low-wage work spells on political alienation. We argue that repeated low-wage work spells lead to preference divergence between a low-income and the median-income earner, leading to withdrawal from democratic politics among low-wage earners. Using Swiss household panel data and fixed-effects regressions, we show that the accumulation of low-wage work spells decreases systemic trust. In a second step, we demonstrate that an interaction of eroding systemic trust with low-wage work is associated with increased individual abstention probabilities. These results highlight the threat of a systematic under-representation of low-wage workers in the political sphere.
In the context of increasingly salient economic disparities between member states, this article tests the novel theoretical claim that perceptions of inequality between European Union (EU) member states diminish citizens' trust in European institutions. Drawing on system justification theory, we argue that the negative effect of perceived intercountry inequality will be reduced as individuals become more willing to accept social inequality and to reject redistribution. We test these propositions using a survey experiment conducted in Spain (Study 1) and a representative survey in eight EU countries (Study 2). Results from Study 1 show that when citizens are led to believe that overall levels of inequality within the EU are high, they tend to express lower levels of trust in European institutions than when displayed low levels of inequality. This finding is replicated in Study 2 using observational data on individual perceptions of inequality between countries. Results confirm the role of system-justifying beliefs as a psychological antecedent of responses to inequality between countries.
The European Union (EU) is facing one of the rockiest periods in its existence. At no time in its history has it looked so economically fragile, so insecure about how to protect its borders, so divided over how to tackle the crisis of legitimacy facing its institutions, and so under assault by Eurosceptic parties. The unprecedented levels of integration in recent decades have led to increased public contestation, yet at the same the EU is more reliant on public support for its continued legitimacy than ever before. This book examines the role of public opinion in the European integration process. It develops a novel theory of public opinion that stresses the deep interconnectedness between people’s views about European and national politics. It suggests that public opinion cannot simply be characterized as either Eurosceptic or not, but rather that it consists of different types. This is important because these types coincide with fundamentally different views about the way the EU should be reformed and which policy priorities should be pursued. These types also have very different consequences for behaviour in elections and referendums. Euroscepticism is such a diverse phenomenon because the Eurozone crisis has exacerbated the structural imbalances within the EU. As the economic and political fates of member states have diverged, people’s experiences with and evaluations of the EU and national political systems have also grown further apart. The heterogeneity in public preferences that this book has uncovered makes a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing Euroscepticism unlikely to be successful.