La demanda de los individuos y del mercado

One important question that arises when examining attitudes towards the EU is whether these attitudes are merely a reflection of the voter’s position on the left–right spectrum, or whether they represent an additional, orthogonal dimension to Europeans’ political views. There are competing views in the literature as to the relationship between these two dimensions. The ‘international relations model’ sees the European question as unrelated to domestic left–right questions, pertaining instead to questions of national interest, so that the major parties in a particular country might be expected to show some agreement on the question of integration (Steenbergen and Marks 2004, 5–6). Hix and Lord (1997, 26), on the other hand, argue that the integration question is a second, orthogonal dimension to the politics of EU mem- ber states. This still assumes that the two dimensions are independent but it also permits intranational contestation of the integration question. An analysis of European manifestos has given this model some empirical support (Hix 1999). A third model is the ‘regulation model’ (Steenbergen and Marks 2004, 7–8; Tsebelis and Garrett 2000), which argues that the European dimension is not independent of the left–right dimension. In this model, those on the left are supposed to be in favour of higher regulation and therefore greater European in- tegration and those on the right of less regulation and so looser European integration. Finally, Hooghe and Marks (1999) argue that the two dimensions cannot be collapsed together but are not independent either. Political positions along these two dimensions are constrained by ‘the emergence of a cleavage ranging from center-left supranationalists who support regulated capitalism to rightist nationalists who support neoliberalism’ (76).

Efforts to compare these models empirically have made similar findings, although their in- terpretations differ in some respects. Gabel and Hix (2004, 111) found that the best perform- ing model was the traditional unidimensional left–right model in their analysis of European election manifestos. Gabel and Anderson (2004, 30) agree that European politics is effectively

7.2. MEASURING ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE EUROPEAN UNION 165 unidimensional in their study of citizen attitudes, although they appear to favour a Hooghe- Marks interpretation of that dimension. According to Hooghe, Marks and Wilson (2004, 139), European integration is structured by the traditional left–right dimension but the two dimen- sions are not identical because parties at the extreme left and right are less supportive of the EU than parties occupying the centre. Others argue that attitudes towards the EU are a reflec- tion of not so much a person’s political views but their perceptions of their own government. Harteveld, van der Meer and De Vries (2013, 561) observed that trust in national institutions was an important predictor of trust in the EU in Eurobarometer survey data from 2009. This was seen as confirming their hypothesised ‘logic of extrapolation’, which proposed that ‘the legitimacy of the EU is actually derived indirectly, through the legitimacy of the individual member states’ (546–547).

Even when a second, European dimension of political space has been recognised, its im- portance has not been undisputed. Van der Eijk and Franklin (2004, 32) have shown that this dimension has not had a large influence on European political behaviour, although this work took place well before the Great Recession. They argue that this is not because this dimension is unimportant to European voters but rather because the parties on offer at EU elections do not cover the entire political space, which means that voters are not currently free to select parties according to both their left–right preferences and their preferences towards the EU. For this reason, they describe this European preference dimension as a ‘sleeping giant’ that has the potential to awaken as a new motivator for vote choice if either new parties emerge to fill those empty parts of the political space or unforeseen events lead voters to prioritise their EU preferences over their left–right preferences (van der Eijk and Franklin 2004). One of the goals of this chapter is to determine whether either the Great Recession or the austerity period could be said to have constituted such an event.

For the purposes of this chapter, it is assumed that there is an EU dimension to Europeans’ political views and that this can be measured through survey questions. It is not however assumed that this is completely independent of the left–right dimension and this is why the models introduced later in the chapter control for the individual’s left–right position. As will be seen, the results from those models suggest that, while there is a relationship between the two dimensions, this relationship is not overwhelmingly powerful nor is left–right position the dominant predictor of attitudes towards the EU.

Precisely how to measure these attitudes is also not uncontested. Boomgaarden et al. (2011, 242) argue that discussion of attitudes towards the EU requires more precise terms

than ‘EU support’ or ‘Euroscepticism’. To this end, they conducted a survey in the Netherlands in 2008 asking various different questions about attitudes towards the EU (246). A factor analysis of their results found five factors, each consisting of five items. These factors were identified as negative affection, identity, performance, utilitarianism and strengthening (247– 251). Unfortunately, the EES survey data does not include items that would allow each of these dimensions to be measured in every year but it does include one question corresponding to the utilitarianism dimension and one corresponding to the strengthening dimension. These are the questions asking whether membership of the EU is a good thing and whether European integration has gone too far respectively. Since these two questions appear to be measuring somewhat different things, they are both analysed in this chapter.

There are several questions in the EES surveys asking about attitudes towards the European Union. Often there are corresponding questions about the respondent’s national government, which would allow attitudes towards the EU and towards national governments to be com- pared directly. Unfortunately, the set of questions asked is different in each wave and some otherwise promising questions were not asked in each of the years under study. For example, questions about satisfaction with democracy in both the EU and the respondent’s country were asked in both 2004 and 2009 but not in 2014. Questions about trust in the national and European parliaments were missing from the 2009 survey and questions about whether the national and European parliaments respond to the concerns of citizens were not asked in the 2004 survey.

Despite these difficulties, a set of survey questions was selected that does offer a useful comparison of attitudes towards the EU across the years of interest. The first of these questions asked voters to give an opinion as to whether further European unification is desirable. The precise wording of the question is:

Some say European unification should be pushed further. Others say it already has gone too far. What is your opinion? Please indicate your views using a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means unification ‘has already gone too far’ and 10 means ‘it should be pushed further’. What number on this scale best describes your position?

This wording is almost identical in all three years, except that in 2004 a ten-point scale was used rather than an eleven-point scale. The use of ten-point scales was a consistent feature of the 2004 survey wave. In order to make these responses comparable to the responses in the later waves, the same correction was applied as was used for similar scales in previous chapters. See Chapter 2 for full details.

7.2. MEASURING ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE EUROPEAN UNION 167 The second question asks voters their opinion of their country’s EU membership. The wording is almost identical in all three years:

Generally speaking, do you think that [country’s] membership of the European Union is a good thing, a bad thing, or neither good nor bad?

Although this question is superficially similar to the first question, they are measuring different things. It is quite consistent to believe, for example, that European integration has gone too far while still holding that membership of the EU is a good thing. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the two variables are only weakly correlated (Spearman’sρ =0.38). If the two variables were in fact measuring the same thing, this correlation ought to be considerably stronger.

The final two questions ask voters to attribute a degree of responsibility for their country’s economic conditions to their country’s government and to the EU respectively. The 2009 survey worded the questions as following:

Now I would like to ask you some questions about how much responsibility the

[country’s]government and the European Union have for some of the things going on in[country]. Of course you may think that neither is responsible.

First, thinking about the economy, how responsible is the[country’s]government for economic conditions in[country]? Please indicate your views using any num- ber on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means ‘no responsibility’ and 10 means ‘full responsibility’.

And what about the European Union, how responsible is the EU for economic conditions in[country]?2

Unfortunately, these questions were only introduced in 2009, so they are not included in the 2004 survey. These questions are, however, so directly relevant to this thesis that they are worth using despite this omission. This means that it is not possible to gain as complete a pic- ture of this variable as it is other variables, in that 2004 cannot serve as a baseline comparison year in this case. On the other hand, this pair of variables does make it possible to examine the relative responsibility assigned to governments compared to the EU in the key years of 2009 and 2014.

2_{The wording used in the 2014 survey is: ‘Now I would like to ask you some questions about how much} responsibility the different institutions have in the current economic situation in[country]. Please use a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means that you think they have “no responsibility” and 10 means that they “full responsibility”.’ The country’s government and the European Union are the first two institutions read out.

7.3

Hypotheses

The focus of this chapter is voter attitudes towards the European Union. The objective is to determine whether there was an observable shift in attitudes in the post-recession period. Such a shift could help to explain the results of the previous chapters, in which it was found that the most notable changes took place in the period following the recession rather than during the recession itself. Based on these findings, it was theorised that it was chiefly the austerity policies characterising the post-recession period that voters were reacting against. If this theory is accurate, then it would be expected that voters reacted against the EU in particular during this period, as the EU was strongly associated with these austerity policies. This chapter tests four specific hypotheses derived from these ideas.

The first hypotheses concern support for the institutions of the EU. This chapter has in- troduced two relevant variables, namely the respondent’s opinion about the desirability of continued European integration and whether membership of the EU is a good thing for the respondent’s country. Although it has been argued that these variables are measuring differ- ent things, it is hypothesised that they have been affected similarly by the events of the Great Recession and its aftermath. One of the key ideas in previous chapters has been that the eco- nomic voting concept is generalisable beyond vote choice to related variables, such as turnout. Accordingly, it is expected that support for EU institutions is likewise influenced by a citizen’s prospective economic assessment. This leads to the chapter’s first hypothesis:

Hypothesis 7.1 Support for both EU membership and further European integration is greater among voters who have an optimistic economic assessment.

Previous work using Eurobarometer survey data has already shown that support for both of these is linked to an individual’s retrospective economic assessment (Gabel and Whitten 1997). It has also been shown, using the 2009 EES survey data, that a positive retrospective assess- ment is associated with greater satisfaction with democracy at the EU level (Hobolt 2012, 99). Although this thesis uses some of the same data, it is still useful to test this hypothesis for two reasons. Firstly, those studies tested a retrospective version of the hypothesis, whereas this thesis is focused on the effects of prospective economic assessment.3 The second reason is that this study includes the data from not only 2009 but also 2004 and 2014, which provides

3_{The main reason for this is that the respondents in the 2009 EES survey were broadly in agreement that the} economy had worsened over the past year, whereas there was considerably more variation in the responses to the prospective question. Chapter 1 discusses this issue in greater depth.

7.3. HYPOTHESES 169 an opportunity to examine how this relationship has evolved over the course of the recession and its aftermath.

The main idea that this chapter seeks to test is that the post-crisis austerity policies are responsible for a voter backlash against the European Union. If this is indeed the case, then it would be expected that there would be an observable decline in support for the institutions of the EU in the period following the crisis. The second hypothesis is thus:

Hypothesis 7.2 Support for both EU membership and further European integration fell between 2009 and 2014.

Some existing studies have looked at related questions. For example, Armingeon and Ceka (2014, 83) observe that trust in the EU has fallen considerably over the course of the Great Recession, particularly in Greece. They argue that this can largely be explained by falling sup- port for national governments (103). In a multilevel analysis of European Social Survey data from 2002, Kumlin (2009, 416) found a link between support for further European integration and both national public service dissatisfaction and national social spending. In particular, he found that both greater public service dissatisfaction and national social spending were associ- ated with reduced integration support. He also found an interaction between these effects, so that the effect of public service dissatisfaction was even stronger in countries with high social spending. Mau (2005) looked at support for EU membership and for social policy-making at the European level. Most relevantly for this study, he found that support for EU membership was greater among those with higher socioeconomic status (79). Garry and Tilley (2014) ar- gue that European citizens are more likely to favour European integration when they perceive that EU policies are preferable to those of the national government. For example, left-leaning citizens in countries where the prevailing consensus is right-leaning ought to be more support- ive of the EU than right-leaning citizens. Their analysis of the 2009 EES survey data supports this theory. While none of these studies address this hypothesis directly, they do add weight to the idea that any decline in economic wellbeing ought to be linked to a reduction in support for the EU.

Furthermore, it would be expected that this decline in support would be concentrated among those voters holding a pessimistic assessment of the economy. The reason for this is that optimistic voters presumably believe that the current economic policy is effective, whereas pessimistic voters would be more critical. Since this relationship has already been hypothes- ised to exist, it is expected that it would become stronger during the post-crisis period. The third hypothesis is thus:

Hypothesis 7.3 The effect of economic assessment on support for both EU membership and fur- ther European integration was strengthened between 2009 and 2014.

The final hypothesis concerns the way citizens allocate responsibility for the economy between their national governments and the European Union. If voters did hold the EU to some degree responsible for the austerity policies that were put in place following the reces- sion, then it would be expected that more responsibility for the economy was attributed to the EU during this period than beforehand. Another way of measuring the allocation of re- sponsibility is to look at the difference between how responsible an individual holds the EU and how responsible that same individual holds the national government for the condition of the economy. This then gives an indication of where that individual believes the balance of responsibility between the two institutions lies. For the same reasons as before, it is expected that this balance would have shifted towards the EU during the post-recession period. The final hypothesis is therefore:

Hypothesis 7.4 More economic responsibility was attributed to the EU, both in absolute terms and relative to that attributed to national governments, in 2014 than in 2009.

Hobolt and Tilley (2014, 33–34) looked at the responsibility questions in the 2009 EES survey, including those for non-economic areas of responsibility and they also conducted an expert survey asking the same questions. They noted that citizens tended to attribute more respons- ibility for the economy to the EU than experts did (35). While both citizens and experts show some awareness of the various competencies of the EU and of national governments, the com- plexity of EU structures seems to make it difficult for people to make a definitive attribution of responsibility (44-45). This is concerning because it means that European voters’ perceptions of responsibility do not accord with the reality of which institutions hold the relevant powers and this discord is likely to damage long-term trust in those institutions (147). This hypothesis offers an opportunity to further this analysis with respect to responsibility for the economy by examining whether voters attributed responsibility differently following the implementation of austerity policies in so many countries.