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Enforcement and public opinion: the perceived legitimacy of rule of law sanctions
... Two articles use survey experiments to investigate the impact of EU action on public opinion. Stiansen et al. (2024) analyse the impact on public acceptance of, or opposition to, the Polish government's domestic backsliding 'reforms,' whereas Toshkov et al. (2024) study public perceptions of EU enforcement measures themselves. Finally, Cheruvu et al. (2024) draw on an original survey from Hungary to explain public backlash against pro-democracy jurisprudence of international courts such as the CJEU. ...
... Further studies have focused on how the EU's enforcement actions affect public attitudes towards EU institutions (Cheruvu et al., 2024), towards the EU's actions themselves (Schlipphak et al., 2023;Toshkov et al., 2024) and towards the backsliding policies and governments (Stiansen et al., 2024). Furthermore, Wonka et al. (2023) study to what extent the EU enforcement actions have become salient in Polish and Hungarian media, and how they have been leveraged by domestic parties and civil society organisations (CSOs). ...
... Supporters of Law and Justice (PiS) and Fidesz, as well as people with strong national identities or weaker attachment to democratic norms, are much less likely to support EU rule of law enforcement actions compared to supporters of opposition parties and those with strong European identities and commitment to democratic norms. These findings confirm that publics tend to support EU enforcement more if it aligns with their preferred policies and norms (Cheruvu et al., 2024;Stiansen et al., 2024;Toshkov et al., 2024). ...
... On the other hand, EU interventions provide opposition forces with opportunities to question their government's democratic credentials (Wonka et al., 2023). Public opinion surveys do not point to further backlash amongst the domestic public because of EU interventions (Toshkov et al., 2024). Whilst condemnation of undemocratic positions is strong (Wunsch and Gessler, 2023), the EU's efforts receive little domestic support and seem unlikely to generate public pressure for reforms (Toshkov et al., 2024;Wonka et al., 2023). ...
... Public opinion surveys do not point to further backlash amongst the domestic public because of EU interventions (Toshkov et al., 2024). Whilst condemnation of undemocratic positions is strong (Wunsch and Gessler, 2023), the EU's efforts receive little domestic support and seem unlikely to generate public pressure for reforms (Toshkov et al., 2024;Wonka et al., 2023). ...
... In particular, where courts frequently become the target of recalcitrant leaders, public awareness is more likely to be positively and strongly associated with perceptions of executive influence, despite the inclusion of other well-known correlates of citizens' awareness of courts. In contrast, in environments where interbranch dynamics are more hospitable to courts, 14 For additional insight into the Polish and Hungarian publics' reaction to the EU's enforcement actions and the rule of law crises in these countries, see Stiansen et al. (2024), Cheruvu, Krehbiel, and Mussell (2024), and Toshkov et al. (2024). 15 Subsequent scholarship by Gibson and his coauthors would further suggest this support differential was due to the increased exposures to legitimizing symbols (such as gavels, robes, and distinctive judicial procedures), wherein political sophisticates internalize the ways in which courts are unique, apolitical, and apart from the normal rough and tumble of the standard partisan political process (Gibson and Caldeira 2009b;Gibson, Lodge, and Woodson 2014). ...
Awareness of courts has long been theorized to engender enhanced support for judicial independence, but this is a logic that works only under the best of circumstances. We argue that interbranch politics influences what aware citizens know and learn about their court, and we theorize how awareness interacts with individual-level and context-dependent factors to bolster public endorsement of judicial independence in previously unappreciated ways. We fielded surveys in the United States (US), Germany, Poland, and Hungary, countries which diverge in the extent to which the environments are hospitable or hostile to high courts, and whose publics vary greatly in both their awareness of courts and perceptions of executive influence with the judiciary. We suggest that in hospitable contexts, awareness correlates with support for judicial independence, but said association depends on perceptions of executive influence. In hostile contexts where executive interference is common, more aware citizens are more apt to perceive this meddling, and although it might undermine trust in the judicial authority, it does not diminish their demand for judicial independence. Together, these findings underscore that public awareness and support for judicial independence are greatly informed by the political environment in which high courts reside.
... On the other hand, we expect MEPs with sovereignist views (Fabbrini & Zgaga, 2024) to frame the implementation of rule of law reforms by the elected government of a member state as a domestic affair that is subject to national sovereignty alone and thus to reject EU intervention on the grounds that the EU holds no competence in such matters. Subframes in this category also include what Emmons and Pavone have qualified as 'rhetorics of inaction' (2021) that serve to justify a passive EU response due to concerns over undermining mutual trust between member states, the alleged futility of EU interference or the risks of a domestic backlash (the latter aspect is studied also by Toshkov et al., 2024). ...
The European Parliament (EP) has repeatedly been criticised for its slow, insufficient response to democratic backsliding in several member states. At the same time, it is the arena where we find some of the most vigorous defences of the EU's fundamental values and appeals to safeguard the rule of law across the Union. Leveraging an original dataset of MEP statements from plenary debates over the last two EP terms (2009-2019), this article examines the dynamics of norm contestation in the EP's responses to democratic backsliding. We observe a discursive polarisation primarily along ideological lines, with a notable slippage among European People's Party legislators who shift from scepticism towards EU intervention in rule of law matters to overt support. We show how Eurosceptic MEPs and those from backsliding countries seek to appeal to domestic voters by invoking negative partisanship and anti-Western resentment to discredit EU criticism. In contrast, pro-intervention MEPs situate their discourse at the supranational level and focus on defending European unity and the rule of law as shared identity. Overall, the growing contestation over the nature of fundamental values by Eurosceptics has crystallized a more vocal and differentiated engagement of Europhile MEPs in democratic backsliding debates.
Is the public backlash against human rights rulings from European courts driven by substantive concerns over case outcomes, procedural concerns over sovereignty, or combinations thereof? We conducted preregistered survey experiments in Denmark, France, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom using three vignettes: a foreigner who faces extradition, a person fighting a fine for burning Qurans, and a home owner contesting eviction. Each vignette varies with respect to whether a European court disagrees with a national court (deference treatment) and whether an applicant wins a case (outcome treatment). We find little evidence that deference moves willingness to implement judgments or acceptance of court authority but ample evidence that case outcomes matter. Even nationalists and authoritarians are unmoved by European court decisions as long as they agree with the case outcome. These findings imply that nationalist opposition to European courts is more about content than the location of authority and that backlash to domestic and international courts may be driven by similar forces.
Under what conditions do citizens consider external sanctions against their country to be appropriate? Based on the literature on blame shifting, we argue that citizens should become less likely to support external sanctions if their government defends itself, especially if it seeks to shift the blame to the external actors (blame effect). However, this effect may be moderated by which actor identifies and claims the norm violation (source effect) and by whether citizens trust their government (trust effect). We test our expectations by conducting a survey experiment on EU sanctions against democratic backsliding in six countries (n = 12,000). Our results corroborate the blame and source effects, but disconfirm the trust effect. These findings have important implications for the literatures on blame shifting and external sanctions as well as for how the EU and other International Organizations should design their sanctioning mechanisms.
Evolutionary models of dyadic cooperation demonstrate that selection favors different strategies for reciprocity depending on opportunities to choose alternative partners. We propose that selection has favored mechanisms that estimate the extent to which others can switch partners and calibrate motivations to reciprocate and punish accordingly. These estimates should reflect default assumptions about relational mobility: the probability that individuals in one’s social world will have the opportunity to form relationships with new partners. This prior probability can be updated by cues present in the immediate situation one is facing. The resulting estimate of a partner’s outside options should serve as input to motivational systems regulating reciprocity: Higher estimates should down-regulate the use of sanctions to prevent defection by a current partner, and up-regulate efforts to attract better cooperative partners by curating one’s own reputation and monitoring that of others. We tested this hypothesis using a Trust Game with Punishment (TGP), which provides continuous measures of reciprocity, defection, and punishment in response to defection. We measured each participant’s perception of relational mobility in their real-world social ecology and experimentally varied a cue to partner switching. Moreover, the study was conducted in the US (n = 519) and Japan (n = 520): societies that are high versus low in relational mobility. Across conditions and societies, higher perceptions of relational mobility were associated with increased reciprocity and decreased punishment: i.e., those who thought that others have many opportunities to find new partners reciprocated more and punished less. The situational cue to partner switching was detected, but relational mobility in one’s real social world regulated motivations to reciprocate and punish, even in the experimental setting. The current research provides evidence that motivational systems are designed to estimate varying degrees of partner choice in one’s social ecology and regulate reciprocal behaviors accordingly.
Legitimacy is widely invoked as a condition, cause, and outcome of other social phenomena, yet measuring legitimacy is a persistent challenge. In this article, I synthesize existing approaches to conceptualizing legitimacy across the social sciences to identify widely agreed upon definitional properties. I then build on these points of consensus to develop a generalizable approach to operationalization. Legitimacy implies specific relationships among three empirical elements: an object of legitimacy, an audience that confers legitimacy, and a relationship between the two. Together, these empirical elements constitute a dyad (i.e., a single unit consisting of two nodes and a tie). I identify three necessary conditions for legitimacy— expectations, assent, and conformity—that specify how elements of the dyad interact. I detail how these conditions can be used to empirically establish legitimacy (and illegitimacy), distinguishing it from dissimilar phenomena that often appear similar empirically. Followed to its logical conclusion, this operationalization has novel implications for understanding the effects of legitimacy. I discuss these implications, and how they inform debates over the relevance of legitimacy as an explanation for socially significant outcomes.
Recent research indicates that bottom-up EU politicization shapes top-down EU policy enforcement, yet leaves open questions on the pervasiveness of these effects in policy areas that are depoliticized by design. This contribution asks how societal EU politicization shaped the enforcement of the Stability and Growth Pact up until its COVID-19-induced suspension. It employs causal process-tracing to analyse fiscal rule enforcement under varying levels and constellations of EU politicization. Results indicate that enforcement by the European Commission is shaped both by mandate and exogenous pressures created by politicization and the reputational concerns they induce. Moreover, politicization has gradually pushed the Commission towards increasingly flexible enforcement of EU fiscal rules. These conclusions are relevant because they show that politicization permeates even the most depoliticized areas of EU policy. Additionally, they suggest that the SGP's COVID-19-induced suspension can be understood as a continuation of existing enforcement strategies.
Most studies of public opinion towards the European Union focus on attitudes regarding the past and present of the European Union. This study fills a gap by addressing attitudes towards the European Union's future. We expand on a recently developed approach measuring preferences for eight concrete future European Union scenarios that represent the ongoing political and public debate, employing original survey data collected in 2019 in 10 European Union countries. We assess cross-national differences in the distribution of future European Union preferences, as well as in citizens’ motivations to prefer different variants of Europe in the future. The findings show citizens’ fine-grained future European Union preferences, which are meaningfully related to common explanations of European Union support. We also find cross-national differences linked to countries’ structural position within the European Union.
A chronic problem for democratic governments is generating legitimacy for policy decisions that go against substantial groups of citizens’ legitimate interests. The primary means of achieving this aim involves the arrangements through which policy decisions are made. Whereas research in the field has tended to focus on the arrangements leading up to a decision, this paper draws attention to developments after a formal policy decision has been made. We theorize that the formal decision constitutes a focal event that motivates affected individuals to update their beliefs about the decision. We identify four types of potential legitimacy-enhancing post-decision arrangements: how the decision is announced; how it is publicly explained; whether the process allows for post-decision voice; and whether decision-makers take actions to mitigate its negative consequences. The results from two survey experiments with large samples of Swedish adults addressing the case of school closures suggest that post-decision procedures have legitimacy-enhancing potential and that this effect is not dependent on the pre-decision process.
The United Kingdom’s 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum vote to leave the European Union (EU) raised concerns that other countries would follow suit. This article examines how arguments about EU membership related to economic, cultural, political, and security and peace issues could influence how citizens would vote in EU membership referendums. Our two-wave survey experiment on a random sample of the German population and difference-in-differences analysis revealed that only fears of being outvoted in EU decision-making swayed German voters’ attitudes about EU membership, particularly voters with weaker EU support, little EU knowledge and low levels of political engagement. We therefore conclude that concerns about sovereignty loss can be drivers of Euroscepticism even in a country that has vast influence over EU decisions.
As nationalist sentiments gain traction globally, the attitudinal and institutional foundations of the international liberal order face new challenges. One manifestation of this trend is the growing backlash against international courts. Defenders of the liberal order struggle to articulate compelling reasons for why states, and their citizens, should continue delegating authority to international institutions. This article probes the effectiveness of arguments that emphasise the appropriateness and benefits of cooperation in containing preferences for backlash among the mass public. We rely on IR theories that explain why elites create international institutions to derive three sets of arguments that could be deployed to boost support for international courts. We then use experimental methods to test their impact on support for backlash against the European Court of Human Rights in Britain. First, in line with principal-agent models of delegation, we find that information about the court’s reliability as an “agent” boosts support for the ECtHR, but less so information that signals Britain's status as a principal. Second, in line with constructivist approaches, associating support for the court with the position of an in-group state like Denmark, and opposition with an out-group state like Russia, also elicits more positive attitudes. This finding points to the importance of “blame by association” and cues of in/out-group identity in building support for cooperation. The effect is stronger when we increase social pressure by providing information about social attitudes towards Denmark and Russia in Britain, where the public overwhelmingly trusts the Danes and distrusts the Russians. Finally, in contrast to Liberal explanations for the creation of the ECtHR, the study finds no evidence that highlighting the court's mission to promote democracy and international peace contains backlash. We show that the positive effects of the first two arguments are not driven by pre-treatment attitudes such as political sophistication, patriotism, internationalism, institutional trust, or political preferences.
In the face of the discourse about the democratic deficit and declining public support for the European Union (EU), institutionalist scholars have examined the roles of institutions in EU decision making and in particular the implications of the empowered European Parliament. Almost in isolation from this literature, prior research on public attitudes toward the EU has largely adopted utilitarian, identity and informational accounts that focus on individual‐level attributes. By combining the insights from the institutional and behavioural literature, this article reports on a novel cross‐national conjoint experiment designed to investigate multidimensionality of public attitudes by taking into account the specific roles of institutions and distinct stages in EU decision making. Analysing data from a large‐scale experimental survey in 13 EU member states, the findings demonstrate how and to what extent the institutional design of EU decision making shapes public support. In particular, the study finds a general pattern of public consensus about preferred institutional reform regarding powers of proposal, adoption and voting among European citizens in different countries, but notable dissent about sanctioning powers. The results show that utilitarian and partisan considerations matter primarily for the sanctioning dimension in which many respondents in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark and Sweden prefer national courts to the Court of Justice of the EU.
Across established democracies, citizens express high levels of support for decision making via referendums. What drives these preferences remains yet unclear. In this article it is argued that, first, process preferences are less stable than previously assumed but vary substantially across policy proposals. Second, it is suggested that instrumental considerations play an important role in shaping citizens’ preferences for referendums. Specifically, citizens who favour the policy proposal or believe that they hold a majority opinion are expected to express more support for the use of referendums. An original survey was designed and conducted in the Netherlands (N = 1,289) that contains both between and within respondent variation across a range of policy proposals. The findings support these arguments: Both the desire for a specific policy change and the perception of being in the majority with one's policy preference relate to support for the use of referendums across policy proposals, levels of governance, and between and within respondents. This study contributes to a better understanding of process preferences by showing that these preferences have a non‐stable component and that instrumental considerations play an important role in citizens’ support for referendums.
Governments worldwide are regularly faced with severe weather conditions and disasters caused by natural hazards. Does the way in which governments respond to disasters affect their legitimacy? The current study investigated how evaluations of authorities were influenced by four aspects of a governmental response to a hypothetical disaster. In a survey experiment participants read a scenario in which a government distributed aid in the aftermath of a flooding. Data were collected from the Netherlands, France, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia (N = 2,677). Results showed that the government was seen as more legitimate when it was described as distributing resources fairly, following fair procedures, and providing a material benefit to the participant. However, in contrast to predictions derived from system‐justification theory, results showed that outcome dependence was associated with reduced legitimacy. These findings suggest that response policies that address both instrumental and fairness concerns might help maintain positive evaluations of governments.
Researchers need to select high-quality research designs and communicate those designs clearly to readers. Both tasks are difficult. We provide a framework for formally “declaring” the analytically relevant features of a research design in a demonstrably complete manner, with applications to qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research. The approach to design declaration we describe requires defining a model of the world ( M ), an inquiry ( I ), a data strategy ( D ), and an answer strategy ( A ). Declaration of these features in code provides sufficient information for researchers and readers to use Monte Carlo techniques to diagnose properties such as power, bias, accuracy of qualitative causal inferences, and other “diagnosands.” Ex ante declarations can be used to improve designs and facilitate preregistration, analysis, and reconciliation of intended and actual analyses. Ex post declarations are useful for describing, sharing, reanalyzing, and critiquing existing designs. We provide open-source software, DeclareDesign, to implement the proposed approach.
While legitimacy dynamics are paramount in global governance, they have been insufficiently recognized, conceptualized, and explained in standard accounts of international cooperation. This special issue aims to advance the empirical study of legitimacy and legitimation in global governance. It engages with the question of when, how, and why international organizations (IOs) gain, sustain, and lose legitimacy in world politics. In this introduction, we first conceptualize legitimacy as the belief that an IO’s authority is appropriately exercised, and legitimation and delegitimation as processes of justification and contestation intended to shape such beliefs. We then discuss sources of variation in legitimation processes and legitimacy beliefs, with a particular focus on the authority, procedures, and performances of IOs. Finally, we describe the methods used to empirically study legitimacy and legitimation, preview the articles of the special issue, and
chart next steps for this research agenda.
This article reviews the international evidence on the potential nature, sources, and consequences of police and legal legitimacy. In brief, I find that procedural justice is the strongest predictor of police legitimacy in most of the countries under investigation, although normative judgements about fair process may - in some contexts - be crowded out by public concerns about police effectiveness and corruption, the scale of the crime problem, and the association of the police with a historically oppressive and underperforming state. Legitimacy tends to be linked to people's willingness to cooperate with the police, with only a small number of national exceptions. There is also a fair amount of evidence that people who say they feel a moral duty to obey the law tend also to report complying with the law in the past or intending to comply with the law in the future. The main argument is, however, that international enthusiasm for testing procedural justice theory is outpacing methodological rigor and theoretical clarity. On the one hand, the lack of attention to methodological equivalence is holding back the development of a properly comparative cross-national analysis. On the other hand, the literature would benefit from (a) greater delineation between legitimation (the bases on which citizens judge the rightfulness of an institution) and legitimacy (the acceptance or rejection of the rightfulness of an institution and the normatively grounded duty to obey), (b) stronger differentiation between police and legal legitimacy, and (c) more attention given to isolating the mechanisms through which rightfulness and consent motivate cooperation and compliance.
Europeanization research often neglects that the implementation of European Union (EU) policy results in diverse national outcomes, even if member states comply with EU law. Such fine-grained Europeanization patterns have been explored as ‘gold-plating’ and ‘customization’. This contribution builds and expands on this research to propose a general conceptualization and measurement of customization as the changes that provisions of EU Directives undergo in their regulatory density and restrictiveness during legal transposition. Using unique data on the customization of EU directive provisions from two policy areas in 27 countries, our empirical analysis reveals distinct changes in density and restrictiveness, pronounced policy-specific and state-level customization patterns. The findings illustrate how national customization strategies often follow specific EU regulatory logics in different integration contexts. We outline implications for future research on the causes and consequences of the inherent diversity of EU implementation regarding dimensions of customization, issues of legitimacy and effectiveness.
Because the legitimacy of political authorities exists only in the eyes of citizens, this study investigates which criteria citizens use to decide that an authority is legitimate. By comparing ideas about what makes political authorities legitimate, this study in five European democracies and hybrid regimes illuminates the ‘demand side of political legitimacy’. Using original student survey data, this article compares expectations of students from the Netherlands, France, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia about how political authorities should acquire the right to rule and how they ought to behave when in office. The analysis shows that the respondents across the five countries use similar criteria for granting legitimacy. Across the five countries, throughput and input were more important criteria for legitimacy than the output produced by authorities. Although several country differences were found, these differences did not align with regime type. The findings challenge the widespread view that what kind of authorities people consider legitimate is determined by their socialization in a particular political regime.
This article develops the argument that European Union (EU) intervention to protect its core values is likely to provoke unintended and undesired consequences at the domestic level. EU intervention will typically invite the accused government to play the blame game on Brussels. By criticizing the EU for illegitimately interfering with domestic affairs, the government may frame EU intervention as a threat from the outside and present itself as the only safeguard against this threat. As a consequence, support for those domestic actors that were supposed to be weakened by EU intervention is likely to increase in the aftermath of a European intervention, while EU support might significantly drop. The article illustrates this argument by tracing domestic reactions to EU interventions against Austria between 2000 and 2002 and against Hungary since 2010. In conclusion, the EU should be very cautious with such external interventions, since they may easily strengthen anti-EU and illiberal political forces at the domestic level. To minimize the risk of such undesired consequences, bottom–up mechanisms against democratic backsliding should be installed, which would allow disadvantaged domestic groups to appeal to an independent European democracy watchdog if they feel that democratic rules are being violated in their country.
Third-party intervention, such as when a crowd stops a mugger, is common. Yet it seems irrational because it has real costs but may provide no personal benefits. In a laboratory analogue, the third-party-punishment game, third parties ("punishers") will often spend real money to anonymously punish bad behavior directed at other people. A common explanation is that third-party punishment exists to maintain a cooperative society. We tested a different explanation: Third-party punishment results from a deterrence psychology for defending personal interests. Because humans evolved in small-scale, face-to-face social worlds, the mind infers that mistreatment of a third party predicts later mistreatment of oneself. We showed that when punishers do not have information about how they personally will be treated, they infer that mistreatment of other people predicts mistreatment of themselves, and these inferences predict punishment. But when information about personal mistreatment is available, it drives punishment. This suggests that humans' punitive psychology evolved to defend personal interests.
Laboratory experiments, survey experiments and field experiments occupy a central and growing place in the discipline of political science. The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science is the first text to provide a comprehensive overview of how experimental research is transforming the field. Some chapters explain and define core concepts in experimental design and analysis. Other chapters provide an intellectual history of the experimental movement. Throughout the book, leading scholars review groundbreaking research and explain, in personal terms, the growing influence of experimental political science. The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science provides a collection of insights that can be found nowhere else. Its topics are of interest not just to researchers who are conducting experiments today, but also to researchers who think that experiments can help them make new and important discoveries in political science and beyond.
Political scientists designing experiments often face the question of how abstract or detailed their experimental stimuli should be. Typically, this question is framed in terms of tradeoffs relating to experimental control and generalizability: the more context introduced into studies, the less control, and the more difficulty generalizing the results. Yet, we have reason to question this tradeoff, and there is relatively little systematic evidence to rely on when calibrating the degree of abstraction in studies. We make two contributions. First, we provide a theoretical framework which identifies and considers the consequences of three dimensions of abstraction in experimental design: situational hypotheticality, actor identity, and contextual detail. Second, we field a range of survey experiments, varying these levels of abstraction. We find that situational hypotheticality does not substantively change experimental results, but increased contextual detail dampens treatment effects and the salience of actor identities moderates results in specific situations.
Under what conditions will international compliance-monitoring institutions pursue violations of international law? The European Commission’s infringement procedure is a multi-step process that culminates at the Court of Justice of the European Union when a member state has allegedly violated European Union law. The Commission, however, does not have meaningful enforcement powers, and may potentially spend valuable time and resources on a case only for a member state to not comply with European Union law. To manage this opportunity cost of pursuing other violations of European Union law, I argue that the Commission will strategically delay advancing a case through the infringement procedure when it anticipates that the political conditions will be more favorable for compliance in the future. I provide evidence that the Commission delays infringement proceedings when it expects the election of a new government that will be more likely to comply than the incumbent government.
The EU reformed the regulatory rules of the Eurozone in response to the European sovereign debt crisis, empowering the EU to more effectively enforce the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), which is designed to prevent debt crises. Given recent empirical evidence that the EU’s willingness to enforce EU law depends on public opinion, under what conditions will EU residents view SGP enforcement as an effective way of tackling the crisis? I theorize how individuals will evaluate SGP enforcement and test my theory’s predictions using cross-national survey data from all Eurozone member states and Bayesian multi-level models. I find that respondents’ preferences over SGP enforcement depend on the interaction of their political support for the European Economic and Monetary Union and their member state’s noncompliance with the SGP criteria. Public buy-in for SGP enforcement is lower precisely when enforcement is most important.
One of the major findings of the literature on Euroscepticism is that support for European integration generally declines as one moves closer to the extremes of the left-right ideological spectrum. However, in multidimensional policy space, Euroscepticism varies in more complex ways. This article explores the relief of Euroscepticism for citizens in four European states – the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France – based on data from voting advice applications fielded before the 2019 elections of the European Parliament. The results reveal that the way Euroscepticism maps onto other dimensions differs significantly for citizens and for parties and across political contexts. Such variation is important for understanding how preferences for European integration are embedded into existing structures of political competition.
What can policy makers do in day‐to‐day decision making to strengthen citizens' belief that the political system is legitimate? Much literature has highlighted that the realization of citizens' personal preferences in policy making is an important driver of legitimacy beliefs. We argue that citizens, in addition, also care about whether a policy represents the preferences of the majority of citizens, even if their personal preference diverges from the majority's. Using the case of the European Union (EU) as a system that has recurringly experienced crises of public legitimacy, we conduct a vignette survey experiment in which respondents assess the legitimacy of fictitious EU decisions that vary in how they were taken and whose preferences they represent. Results from original surveys conducted in the five largest EU countries show that the congruence of EU decisions not only with personal opinion but also with different forms of majority opinion significantly strengthens legitimacy beliefs. We also show that the most likely mechanism behind this finding is the application of a ‘consensus heuristic’, by which respondents use majority opinion as a cue to identify legitimate decisions. In contrast, procedural features such as the consultation of interest groups or the inclusiveness of decision making in the institutions have little effect on legitimacy beliefs. These findings suggest that policy makers can address legitimacy deficits by strengthening majority representation, which will have both egotropic and sociotropic effects.
In the European Union, states can distribute enforcement prerogatives between a supranational agency, over which they exercise equal influence, and a Council of ministers, where power resources mostly vary by country size. What shapes attitudes towards different enforcement designs? States at greater risk of noncompliance should eschew deeper cooperation and prefer procedures over which they can exercise more influence. Employing an original data set of positions on relevant contested issues during the negotiations over fiscal governance rules from 1997 to 2012, we show that governments at greater risk of noncompliance prefer greater discretion and, if they have higher voting power, more Council involvement in enforcement. These factors only partially explain positions on Commission empowerment. Given their greater indeterminacy, attitudes are also shaped by national public opinion.
Surveys often ask respondents how information or events changed their attitudes. Does [information X] make you more or less supportive of [policy Y]? Does [scandal X] make you more or less likely to vote for [politician Y]? We show that this type of question (the change format) exhibits poor measurement properties, in large part because subjects engage in response substitution. When asked how their attitudes changed, people often report the level of their attitudes rather than the change in them. As an alternative, we propose the counterfactual format, which asks subjects what their attitude would have been in the counterfactual world in which they did not know the treatment information. Using a series of experiments embedded in four studies, we show that the counterfactual format greatly reduces bias relative to the change format.
We draw on the focus theory of normative conduct and nudge theory to experimentally test the effect of descriptive social norms on desired behaviors that public employees may engage in at suboptimal levels, namely vaccination and help‐seeking. Through a series of framed randomized controlled trials with 19,984 public healthcare professionals, we demonstrate that descriptive norms – doing what the majority of others do – trigger conformity. Specifically, employees are more likely to get a flu shot and advocate vaccination when knowing that the majority of their colleagues get vaccinated against the seasonal influenza compared to when most colleagues do not. Similarly, the probability of making help requests on the job is noticeably higher when asking colleagues for advice is the norm rather than not. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these experiments for scholars and policy makers interested in predictably altering high‐stakes behaviors among public employees through low‐powered incentives.
Case salience data are prominent in the US judicial politics literature. By contrast, such data is not available for most other courts. With the continued judicialization of politics in the EU and the CJEU’s growing importance, court decisions could increasingly receive public attention. Inspired by US case salience data this paper provides insight into new data on newspaper coverage of 4357 CJEU decisions in eight EU broadsheets. Asking under which conditions newspapers report on judicial decisions, the article links theoretical expectations about the public salience of court decisions with empirical data on CJEU case salience. Multi-level regression models show that the salience of CJEU decisions varies depending on the standing of courts in national political systems, case characteristics, inter-institutional conflict, and the Court’s public relations activities. These findings have implications for the perception and communication of the CJEU and provide initial insights into media attention for hundreds of CJEU cases.
Evidence of procedural fairness leads individuals to support Supreme Court decisions, even ones with which they disagree. Yet, in some settings, unfair behavior is seen as acceptable, even praiseworthy, if it yields a pleasing outcome for one’s group. The loyalty norm occasionally trumps the fairness norm, and group loyalty has taken on increasing importance in American politics. I use a nationally representative survey with an embedded experiment, and a convenience sample survey experiment, to relate group (i.e., partisan) loyalty and perceptions of (un)fair behavior to support for the Court. I find that when group concerns are unclear, individuals tend to punish the Court for unfair behavior. However, despite conventional wisdom regarding fairness and support, individuals fail to censure unfair behavior when their group benefits from the Court’s impropriety. These effects hold when integrating preferences regarding specific case outcomes. Perceived unfair procedures do not universally harm evaluations of the Supreme Court.
Several theoretical perspectives suggest that when individuals are exposed to counter-attitudinal evidence or arguments, their pre-existing opinions and beliefs are reinforced, resulting in a phenomenon sometimes known as ‘backlash’. This article formalizes the concept of backlash and specifies how it can be measured. It then presents the results from three survey experiments – two on Mechanical Turk and one on a nationally representative sample – that find no evidence of backlash, even under theoretically favorable conditions. While a casual reading of the literature on information processing suggests that backlash is rampant, these results indicate that it is much rarer than commonly supposed.
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.
Commission's expectations on eventual compliance explain its different behaviour when dealing with Rule of Law (RoL) crises in Hungary and Poland. Whilst the Commission activated the first stage of the procedure of article 7 against Poland in December 2017, it resisted to launch the same procedure against the Hungarian government despite mounting criticism and demands from both academics and EU institutions. The Commission considers that compliance depends, on last instance, on the cooperation of domestic authorities. Accordingly, it prefers to engage with them in dialogue and persuasion rather than activating enforcement mechanisms. If engagement strategies fail to obtain compliance, the Commission anticipates the consequence of activating article 7 enforcement: whether it can rely or not on Council support and the effects of not having it and it also anticipates negative consequences such as the future attitude of the affected member state vis-á-vis the EU.
This article calls attention to some designs in survey experiments that give new leverage in hypothesis testing and validation. The premise of this review is the modesty of survey experiments - modesty of treatment, modesty of scale, modesty of measurement. The focus of this review, accordingly, is the compensating virtues of modesty. With respect to hypothesis testing, I spotlight (a) cross-category comparisons, (b) null-by-design experiments, (c) explication, (d) conjoint designs, and (e) sequential factorials. With respect to validation regimes, I discuss (a) parallel studies, (b) paired designs, and (c) splicing. Throughout, the emphasis is on moving from experiment in the singular to experiments in the plural, learning as you go.
States often violate international agreements, both accidentally and intentionally. To process complaints efficiently, states can create formal, pretrial procedures in which governments can negotiate with litigants before a case ever goes to court. If disputes are resolved during pretrial negotiations, it can be very difficult to tell what has happened. Are governments coming into compliance? If so, are they only doing so when they have accidentally committed a violation or even when they are intentionally resisting? Or are challenges simply being dropped? This paper presents a formal model to address these questions. We develop our theory in the context of the European Union (EU). To test our model, we collect a new dataset of over 13,000 Commission infringement cases against EU member states (2003–2013). Our results suggest that accidental and intentional noncompliance both occur, but that intentional noncompliance is more common in the EU. We find that the Commission is an effective, if imperfect, monitor and enforcer of international law. The Commission can correct intentional noncompliance, but not always. It strategically drops cases that it believes it is unlikely to win.
Humans regularly intervene in others' conflicts as third-parties. This has been studied using the third-party punishment game: A third-party can pay a cost to punish another player (the “dictator”) who treated someone else poorly. Because the game is anonymous and one-shot, punishers are thought to have no strategic reasons to intervene. Nonetheless, punishers often punish dictators who treat others poorly. This result is central to a controversy over human social evolution: Did third-party punishment evolve to maintain group norms or to deter others from acting against one's interests? This paper provides a critical test. We manipulate the ingroup/outgroup composition of the players while simultaneously measuring the inferences punishers make about how the dictator would treat them personally. The group norm predictions were falsified, as outgroup defectors were punished most harshly, not ingroup defectors (predicted by ingroup fairness norms) and not outgroup members generally (predicted by norms of parochialism). The deterrence predictions were validated: Punishers punished the most when they inferred that they would be treated the worst by dictators, especially when better treatment would be expected given ingroup/outgroup composition.
This paper presents results from two large-scale natural field experiments that tested the effect of social norm messages on tax compliance. Using administrative data from > 200,000 individuals in the United Kingdom, we show that including social norm messages in standard reminder letters increases payment rates for overdue tax. This result offers a rare example of social norm messages affecting tax compliance behavior in a real world setting. We find no evidence that loss framing is more effective than gain framing. Descriptive norms appear to be more effective than injunctive norms. Messages referring to public services or financial information also significantly increased payment rates. The field experiments accelerated the collection of tax revenue at little cost.
When confronting democratic backsliding in its member states, the European Union (EU) cannot rely on material sanctions. There are formidable obstacles to using the one political safeguard that entails material sanctions, namely Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). Moreover, the experience of the EU’s pre-accession conditionality suggests that even a credible threat of material sanctions is least effective the more severe the breaches of liberal democracy. However, EU interventions without material leverage are not necessarily doomed, as the case of Romania in 2012 shows. Under favourable conditions the EU can thus elicit governments to repeal illiberal practices by relying primarily on social pressure and persuasion. This contribution assesses to what extent novel instruments that EU institutions have developed to confront democratic backsliding meet the requirements for effective social influence. It argues that the Commission’s Rule of Law Framework has potential because it meets the criteria of formalization, publicity and impartiality. Yet, to increase the likelihood of influence, it needs to be applied more consistently and should be embedded in a process of regular monitoring through a democracy scoreboard covering all member states.
This article explores the potential efficacy and limitations of judicial mechanisms as tools to combat democratic backsliding in European Union (EU) member states. The article argues that more can be done to maximize the effectiveness of existing judicial tools, such as infringement proceedings brought to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) by the Commission and private enforcement litigation in national courts. At the same time, we highlight risks inherent in many proposals for novel judicial tools to defend national democracy. We conclude that despite their importance, judicial safeguards alone – whether existing ones or novel proposals – will not suffice to stop democratic backsliding by a determined national government: if the Union is to rein in such attacks on its core values, heads of government and other EU leaders will have to intervene politically as well.
Although it is far too early to say that cognitive neuroscience will have any direct impact on how we sentence criminals, patterns are nevertheless emerging that suggest a neural framework for punishment that could one day have important legal and social consequences.
Public opinion is increasingly at the heart of both political and scholarly debates on European integration. This essay reviews the large literature on public support for, and opposition to, European integration, focusing on conceptualization, causes and consequences: What is public support for European integration? How can we explain variation in support and Euroskepticism? And, what are the consequences of public support for elections and policy-making in the European Union? The review reveals that while a growing literature has sought to explain individual support for European integration, more work is still needed to understand the ways in which opinions are shaped by their national context and how public contestation of the EU poses a challenge to, and an opportunity, for the future of the integration project.
Legal authorities gain when they receive deference and cooperation from the public. Considerable evidence suggests that the key factor shaping public behavior is the fairness of the processes legal authorities use when dealing with members of the public. This reaction occurs both during personal experiences with legal authorities and when community residents are making general evaluations of the law and of legal authorities. The strength and breadth of this influence suggests the value of an approach to regulation based upon sensitivity to public concerns about fairness in the exercise of legal authority. Such an approach leads to a number of suggestions about valuable police practices, as well as helping explain why improvements in the objective performance of the police and courts have not led to higher levels of public trust and confidence in those institutions.
This book offers a systematic treatment of the requirements of democratic legitimacy. It argues that democratic procedures are essential for political legitimacy because of the need to respect value pluralism and because of the learning process that democratic decision-making enables. It proposes a framework for distinguishing among the different ways in which the requirements of democratic legitimacy have been interpreted. Peter then uses this framework to identify and defend what appears as the most plausible conception of democratic legitimacy. According to this conception, democratic legitimacy requires that the decision-making process satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness.