Dynamic Representation: The Case of European Integration

Abstract

This paper asks two questions. First, why are party voters less favourable towards specific EU policies than party elites? Second, how does political representation of EU preferences actually work, is it an elite-or a mass-driven process? The data-sets of the European Election Studies 1979 and 1994 are analysed which involve both an elite and a mass survey component. In contrast to earlier research, it appears that political representation of EU preferences works rather well regarding the grand directions of policy making, and that party elites behave responsively in view of changing EU preferences among their voters. Contents

The aggregating function of political parties in EU decision-making

“…But are we in any position to assess the overall capacity of the EU party system to aggregate across the electoral and parliamentary arenas combined? A good starting point is with the seminal work of Herman Schmitt and Jacques Thomassen Schmitt and Thomassen (2000). In both the 1979 and 1994 European elections, Schmitt and Thomassen found a close fit (with correlation coefficient of 0.…”

Comparing deputies’ and voters’ support for Europe: The case of Portugal

“…Extensive research has been carried out on the nature of support for European integration, but there are few comparisons between the views of national deputies and their voters. The few existing studies rely on proxies for assessing deputies' views: for example, party manifestoes or expert judgements (Van der Eijk and Franklin 1991;Gabel 1998;Ray 2003), while the few studies directly considering elite perceptions of Europe focus on European rather than on national political elites: on Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) (Schmitt and Thomassen 2000); on permanent representatives (Beyers and Dierickx 1997); and on senior European Commission (EC) officials (Hooghe 2001).…”

Public perceptions of the EU as a system of governance

“…Weßels (1995) has argued that due to the complexity of the EU project and distal proximity from the daily lives of individuals, the role of intermediaries is a necessary inclusion, such that evaluations of the role of national political elites led many to conclude that support for continued EU integration was largely an elite-driven process. There is a distinction between EU and national elites (Thomassen and Schmitt 1997) and various analyses show that most elites support European integration to a greater degree than mass publics, such as EU parliamentarians (Schmitt and Thomassen 2000) and governmental elites (Hug and König 2002;Aspinwall 2002). Yes, on the whole, popular attitudes regarding the EU are typically considered to be mediated or even manufactured through the attitudes of national and EU elites (Anderson 1998;Franklin, Marsh, and McLaren 1994a); a premise that is increasingly contested (see below).…”

“…More recently, Crum (2007) demonstrates that for referenda, many Europeans have displayed little support for the EU project despite their partisan affiliation with pro-EU parties. Although possibly related to the temporal nature of referenda (and narrower Living Reviews in European Governance http://www.livingreviews.org/lreg-2008-1 issues), there remains evidence of this attitudinal division among elites and mass publics in other time periods (Schmitt and Thomassen 2000). More recently, Gabel and Scheve (2007) provide a sophisticated statistical analysis of elite cues to suggest that mass publics do respond in accordance to elite positions (and messages) are more influential than early work has demonstrated even for the politically savvy citizen.…”