Public opinion and policy output in the European Union: A lost relationship

Dimiter Toshkov
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Dimiter Toshkov: Leiden University, the Netherlands, dtoshkov@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

European Union Politics, 2011, vol. 12, issue 2, 169-191

Abstract: The European Union (EU) is assumed to suffer from a democratic deficit. It is often posited that in the EU there is only a weak and indirect connection between public preferences and policy change. This article investigates empirically whether any relationship exists between public support for European integration and EU policy output (1973—2008). Using a new indicator of policy output — the volume of important legislation produced in a semester — I discover a surprising relationship between public support and legislative production. Employing vector autoregression (VAR), I demonstrate that public EU support Granger-causes legislative output but not vice versa, and that the relationship is strong up to the middle of the 1990s but non-existent afterwards. The effect is robust to the inclusion of indicators of the state of the economy and government preferences. In addition, I discover that the average level of EU support in the Council of Ministers follows unemployment levels with a four-year delay.

Keywords: democratic deficit; EU public support; legislative production; policy change; policy output; public opinion; vector autoregression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:12:y:2011:i:2:p:169-191

DOI: 10.1177/1465116510395043

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