Reforming supranational institutions: Insights from a conjoint experiment in 16 countries

Catherine E De Vries, Simon Hix and Miriam Sorace

European Union Politics, 2025, vol. 26, issue 4, 649-666

Abstract: Contemporary international organizations face pressure to be more effective and accountable. But reforming them is challenging given stringent supermajority voting requirements and increasingly critical publics. Some argue that institutional preferences are endogenous to policy, or policy-elastic. Are there policy-inelastic institutional preferences? And are there viable European Union (EU) reform packages? We tackle these questions through a conjoint experiment in 16 EU countries. The evidence shows that majoritarian institutional reforms and stronger legal enforcement powers are supported independently of policy. Finally, results from a Bayesian finite mixture model identify combinations of institutional and policy reforms that could command broad public support. The study is significant for the understanding of institutional preferences, as well as for EU reform processes.

Keywords: IO; reform process; preferences; EU decision-making; unanimity; conjoint experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14651165251365561 (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:26:y:2025:i:4:p:649-666

DOI: 10.1177/14651165251365561

Access Statistics for this article

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