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International fiscal rules and domestic support for austerity
Abstract
In recent decades, fiscal integration in Europe has manifested through restrictive rules. However, the consolidation of public finances often encounters citizens’ resistance. International obligations can raise public support for costly domestic policies that are consistent with the obligations’ terms, but can European fiscal pledges influence public opinion and boost support for austerity? I fielded an original survey experiment in Italy and manipulated information about the existence of a new fiscal rule, national or European, mandating austerity measures. In stark contrast with extant research, I find no evidence that the source of the fiscal rule matters when measuring respondents’ support for austerity. This result suggests that the effect of international pledges on garnering public support for costly domestic measures wanes if these measures directly burden citizens’ financial well-being. Moreover, relinquishing fiscal autonomy in favour of new European rules appears unlikely to aid politicians in winning public endorsement for an austerity agenda.
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This paper revisits the conventional but unproven wisdom that voters penalize governments for adopting fiscal austerity in a sample of advanced economies. We consider the composition of the austerity package and the economic manifesto of the implementing government, and find that austerity packages consisting mostly of tax hikes have a significant electoral cost, which is larger for government parties that campaigned on a free‐market manifesto. Conversely, expenditure‐based austerity is costlier for government parties that did not run on a small‐government platform, but may be beneficial for those that did.
The public places an important constraint on funding security in Europe, and austerity risks making the constraint tighter. Several recent studies show that curtailing military spending is a popular way to reduce debt in Europe. Yet it remains unclear if military spending aversion persists when threats are salient. We fielded an original survey experiment in Italy weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine to examine how information about security threats influences military spending preferences and fiscal trade-offs. We found that information about threats increases support for military spending. To validate the survey experiment, we recontacted and remeasured our respondent's preferences three weeks after Russia's invasion and find evidence consistent with our initial experiment. Our findings suggest that, while public opposition to military spending remains high in Italy, external threats dampen the public's opposition to military spending, even under high debt burdens.
In recent decades, governments in many Western democracies have shown a remarkable consensus in pursuing fiscal austerity measures during periods of strained public finances. In this paper, we show that these decisions have consequences for political polarization. Our macro-level analysis of 166 elections since 1980 finds that austerity measures increase both electoral abstention and votes for non-mainstream parties, thereby boosting party system polarization. A detailed analysis of selected austerity episodes also shows that new, small and radical parties benefit most from austerity policies. Finally, survey experiments with a total of 8,800 respondents in Germany, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom indicate that the effects of austerity on polarization are particularly pronounced when the mainstream right and left parties both stand for fiscal restraint. Austerity is a substantial cause of political polarization and hence political instability in industrialized democracies.
Based on a conjoint survey experiment we explore the support among European citizens for a European Union (EU) budgetary assistance instrument to combat adverse temporary or permanent economic shocks hitting Member States. Suitably designed, there is substantial support for such an EU instrument generally and across the sample countries. Support is broader when budgetary support is conditional on debt reduction in good times and on monies being spent in specific policy areas, in particular healthcare and education. Support also increases when there is a role for the European Commission in terms of monitoring and providing guidance. However, there is little support for policy packages that terminate a program and impose fines in the case of non-compliance. Further, there is broad acceptance of programs that entail long-run redistribution towards poorer countries. Financing the assistance through a progressive tax increase is more popular than through a flat tax increase. In general, there is substantial scope for constructing assistance packages that command majority support in all sample countries, particularly if programs have spending conditionality and progressive tax financing.
Ever since the Great Recession, public debt has become politicized. Some research suggests that citizens are fiscally conservative, while other research shows that they punish governments for implementing fiscal consolidation. This begs the question of whether and how much citizens care about debt. We argue that debt is not a priority for citizens because reducing it involves spending and tax trade-offs. Using a split-sample experiment and a conjoint experiment in four European countries, we show that fiscal consolidation at the cost of spending cuts or taxes hikes is less popular than commonly assumed. Revenue-based consolidation is especially unpopular, but expenditure-based consolidation is also contested. Moreover, the public has clear fiscal policy priorities: People do not favor lower debt and taxes, but they support higher progressive taxes to pay for more government spending. The paper furthers our understanding of public opinion on fiscal policies and the likely political consequences of austerity.
The politicisation of the EU renders blame avoidance for unpopular EU policies an essential task for governments. This article looks at one particular blame avoidance strategy, which governments have at their disposal in the EU policy process: the threat of non-compliance. In order to gauge its effectiveness, we present two competing arguments. According to the blame avoidance hypothesis, non-compliance enables governments to shift responsibility for unpopular policies to the EU, because the public lacks knowledge about EU policy-making. Conversely, the blame attraction hypothesis posits that threats of non-compliance will backfire and blame will stick with the government, because non-compliance mobilises constituents favouring compliance with EU rules. We test these hypotheses by analysing blame attributions in the news media covering the Italian government’s threat not to comply with the EU budget provisions in 2018. The findings support the blame attraction hypothesis, suggesting that domestic compliance constituents can impede governments’ blame-shifting attempts.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1909938 .
The COVID-19 pandemic worsened Italy’s fiscal outlook by increasing public debt. If interest rates were to rise, it would become more likely that Italy experiences a financial crisis and requires a European bailout. How does making EU funds conditional on austerity and structural reforms affect Italians’ support for the euro? Based on a novel survey experiment, this article shows that a majority of voters chooses to remain in the euro if a bailout does not involve conditionality, but the pro-euro majority turns into a relative majority for ‘Italexit’ if the bailout is contingent on austerity policies. Blaming different actors for the fiscal crisis has little effect on support. These results suggest that conditionality may turn Italian voters against the euro.
What are the political effects of fiscal consolidations? Theoretical considerations suggest that consolidations should reduce the public’s support for their governments, but empirical studies have found surprisingly small effects on government support. However, most of these studies analyze electoral outcomes, which are separated from the consolidation by a multi-link causal chain. We argue that more direct measures of government support, such as executive approval, show much stronger negative effects of consolidation, since they are less affected by the strategic timing of consolidations or the political alternatives on offer. We analyze a time series cross-sectional dataset of executive approval in 14 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1978 to 2014, using the narrative approach to measure fiscal consolidations. We find that spending cuts decrease government approval, especially during economic downturns, but tax increases’ impact on approval remains minimal. Finally, left- and right-wing governments are equally likely to lose approval after implementing austerity.
During the Great Recession, governments across the continent implemented austerity policies. A large literature claims that such policies are surprisingly popular and have few electoral costs. This article revisits this question by studying the popularity of governments during the economic crisis. The authors assemble a pooled time-series data set for monthly support for ruling parties from fifteen European countries and treat austerity packages as intervention variables to the underlying popularity series. Using time-series analysis, this permits the careful tracking of the impact of austerity packages over time. The main empirical contributions are twofold. First, the study shows that, on average, austerity packages hurt incumbent parties in opinion polls. Secondly, it demonstrates that the magnitude of this electoral punishment is contingent on the economic and political context: in instances of rising unemployment, the involvement of external creditors and high protest intensity, the cumulative impact of austerity on government popularity becomes considerable.
The European Union provided a mixed response to the 2008 financial crisis. On the one hand, it refused to pursue fiscal integration through a common budget; on the other, it introduced significant transfers between countries that were designed to produce financial stabilization. The authors analyze this response as the outcome of democratic constraints on EU leaders. Given the EU’s current institutional structure, citizens’ preferences pose a binding constraint on what leaders can do as these preferences limit the scope of risk-pooling among members and the degree of political tolerance for different courses of action. The authors show that citizens’ preferences reflect differences in the geography of income, production regimes, and institutional organization. The heterogeneity of constituencies’ redistribution preferences combined with a diverse economic geography helps to explain why political constraints on national governments prevent them from engaging in further fiscal integration. By contrast, externalities among member states shift the preferences of citizens who may experience negative effects and make international redistribution politically feasible. The authors analyze these two mechanisms and present novel empirical results on the determinants of preferences for fiscal integration and international redistribution in the aftermath of the eurocrisis.
How does foreign elite rhetoric affect citizens' emotions and attitudes about austerity? In a survey experiment conducted on the online blogs of the two major Italian newspapers, participants read a fictional news article where the German Chancellor addressed Italians. Across treatments, I varied whether the message blamed or praised Italians, and whether the message focused on economic or symbolic concerns. Praise generated enthusiasm whereas blame spurred anger and anxiety. Moreover, respondents with a strong national or European identity who read a message of praise were more enthusiastic, less angry, and less opposed to austerity. Finally, people who identify strongly with the nation reacted more to economic messages whereas those who identify strongly with Europe reacted more to symbolic messages. The results suggest that rhetoric by a prominent European leader can influence citizens' emotions and attitudes toward austerity in the emerging European public sphere.
The United Nations is one of the organizations charged with developing and promoting international human rights law. One of the primary ways that the United Nations tries to do that is by regularly reviewing the human rights practices of member states and then recommending new policies for that state to implement. Although this expends considerable resources, a number of obstacles have made it difficult to empirically assess whether the UN’s review process actually causes countries to improve their human rights practices. To study this topic, we conducted an experiment in Pakistan that tested whether respondents were more likely to support policies aimed at improving women’s rights when they learned that the reforms were proposed by the United Nations. Our results indicate that the respondents who were randomly informed of the United Nations endorsement not only expressed higher support for the policy reforms, but also were more likely to express willingness to ‘mobilize’ in ways that would help the reforms be implemented. Our treatment did not have any effect, however, on respondents that did not already have confidence in the United Nations. This suggests that the international human rights regime may only be able to aid domestic reformers when there is already faith in those institutions.
Using macroeconomic data for 1960–2018, this article analyzes the origins of the crisis of the “post-Maastricht Treaty order of Italian capitalism.” After 1992, Italy did more than most other Eurozone members to satisfy EMU conditions in terms of self-imposed fiscal consolidation, structural reform, and real wage restraint—and the country was undeniably successful in bringing down inflation, moderating wages, running primary fiscal surpluses, reducing unemployment, and raising the profit share. But its adherence to the EMU rulebook asphyxiated Italy’s domestic demand and exports—and resulted not just in economic stagnation and a generalized productivity slowdown but in relative and absolute decline in many major dimensions of economic activity. Italy’s chronic shortage of demand has clear sources: (1) perpetual fiscal austerity; (2) permanent real wage restraint; and (3) a lack of technological competitiveness, which in combination with an overvalued euro weakens the ability of Italian firms to maintain their global market shares in the face of increasing competition of low-wage countries. These three causes lower capacity utilization; reduce firm profitability; and hurt investment, innovation, and diversification. The EMU rulebook thus locks the Italian economy into economic decline and impoverishment. The analysis points to the need to end austerity and devise public investment and industrial policies to improve Italy’s “technological competitiveness” and stop the structural divergence between the Italian economy and that of France/Germany. The issue is not just to revive demand in the short run (which is easy) but to create a self-reinforcing process of investment-led and innovation-driven process of long-run growth (which is difficult).
Governments have great difficulties to design politically sustainable responses to rising public debt. These difficulties are grounded in a limited understanding of the popular constraints during times of fiscal pressure. For instance, an influential view claims that fiscal austerity does not entail significant political risk. But this research potentially underestimates the impact of austerity on voters because of strategic selection bias. To address this challenge, we conduct survey experiments in Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK and Germany. Contrary to the previous literature, the results show that the reelection chances of governments decrease massively when they propose austerity measures. Voters object particularly strongly to spending cuts and, to a lesser extent, to tax increases. While voters also disapprove of fiscal deficits, they weight the costs of austerity policies more than their potential benefits for the fiscal balance. These findings are inconsistent with the policy recommendations of international financial institutions.
How, and under what conditions, can International Organizations (IOs) shape public opinion? The impact of IOs on public support for war has been studied closely by international relations scholars, yet their effects on environmental or human rights issues has not. This is surprising given the extent to which the success of these initiatives will depend upon cooperation through international institutions. This article examines how IOs can influence popular support for two policies aimed at solving global collective action problems: (1) the REDD+ deforestation initiative; and (2) efforts to resettle Syrian refugees. The results presented here use a pair of survey-based experiments to test whether public support for these policies can be affected by the recommendations made by various organizations and their member states. Somewhat surprisingly, the results suggest that endorsements by the United Nations have a greater effect on the US public than do endorsements by organizations known for their technical expertise, or by prominent international NGOs. These findings call into question some of the assumptions we commonly make about the perceived legitimacy of international organizations.
The paper analyses Latvian economic policy during the period 2008–2014 when the country was simultaneously subject to three European Union (EU) economic governance frameworks – the European Semester, the Balance-of-Payments programme and the Maastricht convergence criteria (for euro adoption). Through in-depth process tracing based on public policy documents, interviews with senior officials in Riga and Brussels and the press, the paper finds that the Latvian government cherry-picked and instrumentalized EU economic policy targets and overachieved in them. In contrast to the literature depicting the European Commission as a neoliberal actor which systematically undermines social protection, the paper shows that against the backdrop of fiscally austere national authorities, the Commission instead played the role of social policy advocate, repeatedly calling for stronger measures to help the poor. Shedding light on the limits of one-size-fits-all governance, the findings of the Latvian case have significant implications for EU economic governance more generally.
Scientists should be able to provide support for the absence of a meaningful effect. Currently, researchers often incorrectly conclude an effect is absent based a nonsignificant result. A widely recommended approach within a frequentist framework is to test for equivalence. In equivalence tests, such as the two one-sided tests (TOST) procedure discussed in this article, an upper and lower equivalence bound is specified based on the smallest effect size of interest. The TOST procedure can be used to statistically reject the presence of effects large enough to be considered worthwhile. This practical primer with accompanying spreadsheet and R package enables psychologists to easily perform equivalence tests (and power analyses) by setting equivalence bounds based on standardized effect sizes and provides recommendations to prespecify equivalence bounds. Extending your statistical tool kit with equivalence tests is an easy way to improve your statistical and theoretical inferences.
Why are some politicians guided by a sense of obligation toward international law but others are not? Why do some politicians have a social as opposed to an egoistic preference over compliance with international legal rules? Existing approaches largely assume that the structural features of the compliance environment shape preferences. As a result, they neglect the heterogeneity across decision makers' subjective beliefs in the legitimacy of international law, which is critical for explaining who exhibits a sense of obligation and has a non-egoistic preference for compliance. Drawing upon a large body of psychological research on social identity and influence, I argue that obligation toward international law has a behavioral foundation shaped by cosmopolitan social identity. Using data from an original survey of German politicians that includes two compliance experiments, I show that politicians with a high degree of cosmopolitanism are driven by a sense of legal obligation that results in a social preference for compliance while those low on cosmopolitanism lack the same sense of normative respect. Replicated in a second experimental study conducted with a convenience sample, my results indicate that strategic rationality in compliance applies, but only to a particular set of actors. By illuminating the psychological underpinnings of obligation toward international law, this study contributes to a richer understanding of compliance preferences and builds a bridge between instrumental and normative models.
Voters typically observe macroeconomic outcomes in order to evaluate government performance. However, during crises, when the clarity of economic responsibility is poor and the economy is in recession, citizens need additional sources of information in order to form a reasoned opinion. Government policy response is one such source. This study shows on a sample of 24 European nations from 2004, 2009 and 2014 that in the post-crisis period, economic policies have emerged as one of the key predictors of vote choice, with government decisions to pursue fiscal austerity leading to significantly lower levels of incumbent support. Furthermore, the paper tests the possibility that the effect of austerity is conditioned by the clarity of responsibility. In multilevel systems, where policies are externally imposed, voters could be expected to hold incumbents less accountable for unpopular measures. The analysis, however, provides no evidence that policy effects depend on the extent to which national governments share policy responsibilities with supranational and intergovernmental institutions. Accountability for policy actions is primarily attributed at the domestic level as voters are able to identify the decisional role of national governments.
The human rights movement has spent considerable energy developing and promoting the adoption of both international and domestic legal prohibitions against torture. Empirical scholarship testing the effectiveness of these prohibitions using observational data, however, has produced mixed results. In this paper, we explore one possible mechanism through which these prohibitions may be effective: dampening public support for torture. Specifically, we conducted a survey experiment to explore the impact of international and constitutional law on public support for torture. We found that a bare majority of respondents in our control group support the use of torture, and that presenting respondents with arguments that this practice violates international law or constitutional law did not produce a statistically significant decrease in support. These findings are consistent with prior research suggesting, even in democracies, that legal prohibitions on torture have been ineffective.
The widespread opposition to unprecedented austerity measures in Greece provides a unique opportunity to study the causes of mass protest. This article reports the results of a survey of the adult population in which two-thirds of the respondents supported protest and 29 per cent reported actual involvement in strikes and/or demonstrations during 2010. Relative deprivation is a significant predictor of potential protest, but does not play any role in terms of who takes part in strikes or demonstrations. Previous protest participation emerges as a key predictor of actual protest. This study seeks to place these results within a comparative context, contrasting Greece with other countries facing similar challenges, and discusses the implications for the future of austerity politics.
Is a policymaker's audience more concerned with the consistency between words and deeds or with policy itself? A key assumption of audience costs theories of crisis bargaining and international cooperation is that audience members have strong preferences for consistency between their leader's commitments and their leader's actual policy choices. However, audience members are also likely to have strong preferences over the policy choices in and of themselves, regardless of their consistency with past commitments. I conduct a randomized survey experiment to evaluate the magnitude of consistency and policy effects in the context of international agreements over trade policy. Respondents with expressed policy preferences, whether supporting or opposing free trade, have muted reactions to learning that their leader has broken an agreement. Only respondents with no opinion on trade policy are affected by learning that their leader's policy is inconsistent with prior commitments. This suggests that the ability of audience costs and preferences for consistency to affect policymaker interests is constrained by the underlying preferences of their constituents.
Effective climate mitigation requires international cooperation, and these global efforts need broad public support to be sustainable over the long run. We provide estimates of public support for different types of climate agreements in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Using data from a large-scale experimental survey, we explore how three key dimensions of global climate cooperation-costs and distribution, participation, and enforcement-affect individuals' willingness to support these international efforts. We find that design features have significant effects on public support. Specifically, our results indicate that support is higher for global climate agreements that involve lower costs, distribute costs according to prominent fairness principles, encompass more countries, and include a small sanction if a country fails to meet its emissions reduction targets. In contrast to well-documented baseline differences in public support for climate mitigation efforts, opinion responds similarly to changes in climate policy design in all four countries. We also find that the effects of institutional design features can bring about decisive changes in the level of public support for a global climate agreement. Moreover, the results appear consistent with the view that the sensitivity of public support to design features reflects underlying norms of reciprocity and individuals' beliefs about the potential effectiveness of specific agreements.
A principal agent model is used to test the hypothesis that when proposed uses of force attract the support of the United Nations (UN) Security Council, the rally in support of the American president increases significantly. Regression analysis is applied to rallies during all militarized interstate disputes from 1945 to 2001. Results show that UN Security Council support significantly increases the rally behind the president (by as many as 9 points in presidential approval), even after including an array of control variables. This finding is generally robust across most model specifications. This effect is unique among international institutions because other actions by the UN or regional security organizations do not significantly affect rallies. These findings provide new insight into how international institutions can matter and influence the foreign policies of states by affecting public opinion.
Preferences over jurisdictional architecture are the product of three irreducible
logics: efficiency, distribution and identity. This article substantiates the
following claims: (a) European integration has become politicized in elections
and referendums; (b) as a result, the preferences of the general public and of
national political parties have become decisive for jurisdictional outcomes; (c)
identity is critical in shaping contestation on Europe.
This chapter considers the evidence supporting the conventional wisdom that deficit-reducing policies lead to electoral losses for fiscally conservative governments. It focuses on large fiscal adjustments, which are currently the center of attention in many Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, and shows that there is no evidence that governments which reduce budget deficits even decisively are systematically voted out of office. In some cases they are, in some (more often) they are not. A commentary is also included at the end of the chapter.
International law lacks many of the standard features of domestic law. There are few legislative or judicial bodies with exclusive authority over particular jurisdictions or subject matters, the subjects regulated by international law typically must affirmatively consent to be bound by it, and supranational authorities with the power to coerce states to comply with international obligations are rare. How can a legal system with these features generate changes in state behavior? For many theories, the ability of international law to inform and change individual preferences provides the answer. When voters care that treaty commitments be kept, or that international norms be honored, the theory goes, leaders are more likely to be able to make choices consistent with international obligations. Over the last decade, a literature has emerged testing these theories using surveys and experiments embedded in surveys. Multiple U.S. studies find that international law and international norm arguments shift public opinion in the direction of greater compliance by 4 to 20 percentage points. However, studies in foreign contexts are more mixed, with some backlash reported in countries in which international law is highly politicized. This Article describes the state of current knowledge about whether international law actually does change preferences, explains the limitations with existing research, and proposes avenues for future study.
One of the mechanisms by which international law can shape domestic politics is through its effects on public opinion. However, a growing number of national leaders have begun to advocate policies that ignore or even deny international law constraints. This article investigates whether international law messages can still shift public opinion even in the face of countervailing elite cues. It reports results from survey experiments conducted in three countries – the USA, Australia and India – which examined attitudes on a highly salient domestic political issue: restrictions on refugee admissions. In each experimental vignette, respondents were asked about their opinion on a proposed or ongoing restrictive refugee policy that was endorsed by the government but also likely contravened international refugee law. Respondents were randomly exposed to messages highlighting the policy’s illegality and/or elite endorsement. The results show that, on average, the international law messages had a small but significant persuasive effect in reducing support for the restrictive policy, at most 10 percentage points. Surprisingly, there was no evidence that the countervailing elite endorsement was a significant moderator of this effect. However, in the case of the USA and among Republican co-partisans of the president, the elite endorsement independently increased respondents’ beliefs that the restriction was legal under international law while having no effect on support for the policy. The results suggest that cues from domestic elites do not strictly trump those from international sources and that, despite cues about national leaders’ policy advocacy, international law can affect the attitudes of some voters even on an issue as heavily politicized as refugee policy.
How might voluntary international commitments affect domestic support for costly policies to address climate change? We investigated this question by studying the effect of the Paris Agreement on the American public. Our survey experiments supported three conclusions. First, voluntary international commitments shaped public opinion; public support for emissions control policies was much higher in scenarios where the U.S. government had joined the Paris Agreement than in scenarios where it had not. This effect held not only in the population as a whole, but also by political party. Second, although international agreements were influential in general, they were most effective at changing majority opinion about policies with intermediate costs. Finally, our experiments exposed the dangers of promising too much (overpledging) or too little (underpledging). These findings have important implications for the design and consequences of international agreements.
Political scientists use short vignettes or mock news stories to embed treatments in experimental survey designs. We investigate whether the choice of format entails a trade off between internal and external validity. On the one hand, short vignettes may improve internal validity by isolating key variables without overloading respondents with information, thereby mitigating satisficing and improving data quality. On the other hand, mock news stories may improve external validity by approximating the circumstances under which individuals consume political information, which may enhance the credibility of the information. We find no evidence, however, that short vignettes mitigate satisficing more than mock news stories. Nor do we find that mock news stories enhance individual perceptions of the credibility of the information. Instead, we find that short vignettes are susceptible to confounding, which mock news story mitigate. These findings have important implications for debates about the use of survey experiments in political science.
Because the American states operate under balanced budget requirements, increases in spending in one area typically entail equal and opposite budget cuts in other programs. The literature analysing the correlates of government spending by policy area has mostly ignored these trade-offs inherent to policymaking, failing to address one of the most politically interesting and important dimensions of fiscal policy. Borrowing from the statistical literature on compositional data, we present more appropriate and efficient methods that explicitly incorporate the budget constraint into models of spending by budget category. We apply these methods to eight categories of spending from the American states over the years 1984–2009 to reveal winners and losers in the scramble for government spending. Our findings show that partisan governments finance their distinct priorities by raiding spending items that the opposition prefers, while different political institutions, economic conditions and state demographics impose different trade-offs across the budget.
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.
What explains variation in individual attitudes toward government deficits? Although macroeconomic stance is of paramount importance for contemporary governments, our understanding of its popular politics is limited. We argue that popular attitudes regarding austerity are influenced by media (and wider elite) framing. Information necessary to form preferences on the deficit is not provided neutrally, and its provision shapes how voters understand their interests. A wide range of evidence from Britain between 2010 and 2015 supports this claim. In the British Election Study, deficit attitudes vary systematically with the source of news consumption, even controlling for party identification. A structural topic model of two major newspapers' reporting shows that content varies systematically with respect to coverage of public borrowing—in ways that intuitively accord with the attitudes of their readership. Finally, a survey experiment suggests causation from media to attitudes: deficit preferences change based on the presentation of deficit information.
Are welfare state reforms electorally dangerous for governments? Only recently have political scientists begun to study this seemingly simple question, and existing work still suffers from two shortcomings. First, it has never tested the reform-vote link with data on actual legislative decisions for enough points in time to allow robust statistical tests. Second, it has failed to take into account the many expansionary reforms that have occurred in recent decades. Expansions often happen in the same years as cutbacks. By focusing only on cutbacks, estimates of the effects of reforms on government popularity become biased. In this paper, we address both shortcomings. Our results show that voters punish governments for cutbacks, but also reward them for expansions, making so-called “compensation” a viable blame avoidance strategy. We also find that the size of punishments and rewards are roughly the same, suggesting that voters’ well-documented negativity bias does not directly translate into electoral behavior
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.
Responsiveness is a central quality of representative democracy. During the past decades, a number of innovative studies have advanced our knowledge about actual responsiveness processes. However, research on the consequences that follow from responsiveness has lagged behind and forms the subject of this special issue. Our introduction identifies a range of conceptual issues that arise as we focus attention on citizens’ reactions to the ways in which politicians relate to public sentiments between elections.
Order within Anarchy focuses on how the laws of war create strategic expectations about how states and their soldiers will act during war, which can help produce restraint. The success of the laws of war depends on three related factors: compliance between warring states and between soldiers on the battlefield, and control of soldiers by their militaries. A statistical study of compliance of the laws of war during the twentieth century shows that joint ratification strengthens both compliance and reciprocity, compliance varies across issues with the scope for individual violations, and violations occur early in war. Close study of the treatment of prisoners of war during World Wars I and II demonstrates the difficulties posed by states' varied willingness to limit violence, a lack of clarity about what restraint means, and the practical problems of restraint on the battlefield.
Political strategy matters – especially in the case of unpopular reforms. This is the main argument of this article. It shows that the analysis of political strategies gives complementary insights into the causal mechanisms of reform politics. It helps us to understand how political actors successfully implement unpopular reforms. The article provides empirical evidence for this claim by means of an analysis of adjustment efforts in Sweden, Belgium, Canada and France during the 1990s. It is shown that governments acted strategically in two areas: they used strategic manoeuvres in the political sphere in order to circumvent veto players. And they employed strategic organisation and communication in the public sphere in order to dampen the risk of being punished by voters for the implemented policies.
General families of null hypotheses are defined which refer to problems of testing equivalence and difference between treatments. Corresponding confidence intervals have been proposed in the literature in a different context. The unifying approach demonstrates how waiving of particular one-sided tests in the parameter space relates to the construction of the corresponding confidence interval.
Research on democratic representation and public opinion formation has largely ignored one another. Once one considers the reality of the political communication environment, a fundamental tension between these two literatures emerges. In this essay, I review work on each, highlighting problems with both how “quality opinion” is often defined and how representation is typically studied. I then offer a way forward.
This paper asks what explains similar Eurosceptic positions between radical right and radical left parties. In answering this question, it focuses on the paradoxical role of nationalism as an integral part of the discourse of both radical right and radical left wing parties. Although these two party families differ in terms of origins, transnational links and policy and although nationalism is usually associated with parties of the right in the literature, this paper argues that in fact nationalism cuts across party lines and is associated with both party families’ opposition to European integration. In order to test our argument, we employ a mixed methods approach. First, we use a new dataset from the 2009 Euromanifestos Project (EMP), which coded party manifestos. We have isolated questions that refer to nationalism and European integration and examine broad policy parallels between the two party families across Europe. Second, we apply the findings from the quantitative analysis on Greece and France as two countries with a strong presence of both radical right and radical left small parties.
Domestic approaches to compliance with international commitments often presume that international law has a distinct effect on the beliefs and preferences of national publics. Studies attempting to estimate the consequences of international law unfortunately face a wide range of empirical and methodological challenges. This article uses an experimental design embedded in two U.S. national surveys to offer direct systematic evidence of international law's effect on mass attitudes. To provide a relatively tough test for international law, the surveys examine public attitudes toward the use of torture, an issue in which national security concerns are often considered paramount. Contrary to the common contention of international law's inefficacy, I find that legal commitments have a discernible impact on public support for the use of torture. The effect of international law is also strongest in those contexts where pressures to resort to torture are at their highest. However, the effects of different dimensions in the level of international agreements' legalization are far from uniform. In contrast to the attention often devoted to binding rules, I find that the level of obligation seems to make little difference on public attitudes toward torture. Rather, the relative precision of the rules, along with the degree to which enforcement is delegated to third parties, plays a much greater role in shaping public preferences. Across both international law and legalization, an individual's political ideology also exerts a strong mediating effect, though in varying directions depending on the design of the agreement. The findings have implications for understanding the overall impact of international law on domestic actors, the importance of institutional design, and the role of political ideology on compliance with international agreements.
Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the informational role of international institutions. However, several questions about the informational aspects of institutional behavior remain underexplored: What determines how audiences respond to institutional decisions? Through what channels does information provision affect foreign policy? To answer these questions, I develop a formal model motivated by recent literature on the informational effects of security institutions. The formal model depicts information transmission between a domestic audience, an international institution, and a foreign policy maker. Statements issued by member states through the institution serve to inform the audience about the likely outcomes of its leader’s actions. The model demonstrates that leaders have incentives to consult relatively conservative institutions, because their support convinces audiences that they should also support proposed policies. Leaders face incentives to avoid the disapproval of more revisionist institutions, because their opposition will tend to induce public opposition. The empirical implications are discussed.
One of the most discussed issues surrounding the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) is the way in which it influences national social policies. This article argues that the question of influence is incorrectly posed. Instead, the OMC has to be understood as a 'two-level game' in which member state governments and non-governmental actors try to have an impact on the definition of the OMC objectives and, subsequently, strategically and selectively use the OMC in national policy-making processes. This, however, entails problems in terms of the transparency of policy-making processes and the accountability of national governments.
Focusing on the identity and role perceptions of national officials in EU policy-making, intergovernmentalism may be transcended in two different ways. First, as asserted by neo-functionalists, national elites may shift their loyalty from a national to a supranational level owing to the effect of EU institutions. Second, as could perhaps be interpreted as the argument of the functionalists, functional role orientations acquired in sectoral ministries and specialized agencies at the national level may be sustained in the cross-border interactions of national officials. Based on an organizational and institutional perspective, the identity and role conceptions, and their conditions, are analysed by applying interview data from forty-seven national transport ministry officials in five small member states.
Recent scholarship on international institutions has begun to explore potentially powerful indirect pathways by which international institutions may influence states’ domestic politics and thereby influence the foreign policy preferences and strategies of state leaders. In this paper, we provide evidence documenting the indirect impact of institutional cues on public support for the use of force through an analysis of individual-level survey data and a survey-based experiment that examines support for a hypothetical American intervention in East Timor. We find that institutional endorsements increase support for the use of force among members of the American public who value the institution making the endorsement and among those who do not have confidence in the president. These individual-level analyses show that international institutions can affect domestic support for military action by serving providing a valuable “second opinion” on the proposed use of force.
How does international law affect preferences and beliefs about foreign policy? I investigate this question by offering the first-ever experimental analysis of treaty commitments. The experiments, embedded in interviews with US voters and British policymakers, reveal three patterns. First, international law transforms policy preferences. Individuals are far more likely to oppose policies that would violate international legal agreements than to oppose otherwise identical policies that would not trammel upon existing pacts. Second, international law shapes expectations. Many individuals, including expert policymakers, believe that signatories to international treaties will behave differently from non-signatories. Third, the effect of international law is additive, not absolute. If the material and moral case for violating international law is sufficiently strong, large numbers of voters and policymakers will advocate breaking the law and will expect foreign leaders to do the same. Thus, the experiments reported here reveal both the power and the limits of international law.