The Democracy Deficit and Mass Support for an EU-Wide Government

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

Opportunity or threat? Public attitudes towards EU freedom of movement

“…First, we fill a substantive gap in the literature by examining for the first time Euroscepticism from the perspective of preferences for EU freedom of movement. Second, we build on and extend literature that examines the domestic foundations of EU preferences (De Vries 2017;Rohrschneider 2002;Rohrschneider and Loveless 2010;S ‡nchez-Cuenca 2000) by pointing to the role of country-specific factors in understanding why some individuals support freedom of movement and others oppose it. We show that national GDP is the most prominent determinant of opposition to free movement.…”

Public perceptions of the EU as a system of governance

“…Both Rohrschneider (2002) and Sánchez-Cuenca (2000) argue that evaluations of EU institutions emerge from individuals' assessments of the quality of national institutions; however, they do so in ways that contradict other works on proxy evaluations. Sánchez-Cuenca (2000) argument is somewhat different from the core of popular perceptions of the EU as a system of government than Rohrschneider's.…”

“…Scharpf (1999) has re-conceptualized the dual notion of legitimacy as input/output legitimacy (see above). Not only should institutions be 'democratic enough' but also produce policies that are congruent with publics' own preferences (see also Rohrschneider 2002). As scholars have noted, these are not properly controlled or accountable to national institutions or constituencies (Newman 1996: 173).…”

“…Many authors have answered that not only are they important, they obscure the individuallevel variation and may be thought to be developed in the national level context (Deflem and Pampel 1996;Kritzinger 2003). Several works have presented evidence that popular perceptions of the EU are conditioned by national institutional factors (Anderson 1998;Martinotti and Stefanizzi 1995;Sánchez-Cuenca 2000;Rohrschneider 2002). The most fertile branch of this argument has been that individuals' evaluation of the EU depends on the nation-state performance.…”

“…Rather than see both national governments and the EU as a singular, or overtly similar, set of political institutions, Sánchez-Cuenca argued that lower national institutional evaluation was correlated with support for the EU through not only the lower opportunity costs of transferring sovereignty to the EU but also the appeal to a less corrupt -as were many national governments were perceived as being -version of democratic governance. Rohrschneider (2002) refines this line of reasoning by arguing that individuals' perceptions of how well governments are representing their interests are somewhat shaped by the performance of arbitrating institutions -specifically bureaucracies and judiciaries 18 Caldeira (1995, 1998) add the European Court of Justice as an EU institution other than the EP as another potential source for continuing perceptions of low legitimacy.…”