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

Dimiter Toshkov (1)

1 Universiteit Leiden = Leiden University

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.

Mots clés: democratic deficit; EU public support; legislative production; policy change; policy output; public opinion; vector autoregression

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Dimiter Toshkov. Public opinion and policy output in the European Union: A lost relationship. European Union Politics, 2011, 12 (2), pp.169-191. ⟨10.1177/1465116510395043⟩. ⟨hal-00828977⟩