Eurozone bailouts and national democracy: Detachment or resilience?

Dominik Schraff and Frank Schimmelfennig
Additional contact information
Dominik Schraff: Center for Comparative and International Studies, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

European Union Politics, 2019, vol. 20, issue 3, 361-383

Abstract: How did the Eurozone bailouts affect national democracies? Recent research indicates strong citizen detachment due to the external constraints imposed by bailout programs on national autonomy. This paper re-examines the detachment thesis by broadening the view toward multiple dimensions of democracy and effect heterogeneity across time and space. Using the generalized synthetic control method, we find a negative effect of bailouts on satisfaction with democracy and turnout but show that effects vanish after several years and vary strongly across bailout cases. In addition, we find resilient attitudes and behaviors in spite of national democratic institutions that continue to deteriorate. These findings indicate that economic policy outcomes have a stronger influence on satisfaction with democracy and electoral turnout than the quality of the democratic process.

Keywords: Bailout; democracy; Eurozone; generalized synthetic control method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116519848846 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:20:y:2019:i:3:p:361-383

DOI: 10.1177/1465116519848846

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().