This study investigates whether public opinion shapes compliance with European environmental directives. Drawing on an original dataset of subnational infringements from 2005 to 2018 across 319 subnational authorities in 20 member states, the analysis links variation in public opinion to compliance using mixed-effects logistic regression models. The results show that subnational public opinion does not exert an independent effect on the likelihood of infringement. Instead, national environmental attitudes emerge as consistently relevant for subnational compliance, with subnational authorities in member states that are less supportive of environmental protection significantly more likely to infringe European Union legislation. Subnational environmental attitudes matter where national environmental support is weak. These findings demonstrate that responsiveness in multilevel governance is conditional upon the interaction between national and subnational public opinion.
This study explores citizens’ attitudes towards European integration, moving beyond a simplistic ‘yes’ or ‘no’ perspective. Focusing on the EU–Swiss relationship, it examines a variety of integration questions using 2019 Swiss Election Study data. Latent profile analysis identifies five citizen groups that share similarities in support and opposition patterns regarding the studied questions: ‘pure sovereignists’, ‘neutrals’, ‘pure integrationists’, ‘cultural sovereignists’ and ‘economic integrationists’. The latter two groups are both comparatively more favourable of economic than cultural European integration, substantiating the claim that integration attitudes are multidimensional. Investigating the predictors of adherence to these two groups, the study finds education, income and party vote intentions to have a differentiated effect. Relevant group comparisons show that education and radical right vote intentions differentiate positions along the cultural, but not the economic, European integration dimension, whereas income, radical left and liberal vote intentions differentiate positions along the economic, but not the cultural, dimension.
We present the Random Exchange model, an extension of the bilateral exchange model of collective decision-making of Stokman and Van Oosten. Compared to more elementary models, the Random Exchange model generates predictions of the process leading to the outcome and enhances understanding of deadlock or difficulties in the negotiation process. After explaining its logic, the Random Exchange model is applied to collective decision-making in the international setting of two climate agreements, chaired by the European Union; the 2009 Climate Conference of Parties (COP) in Copenhagen, and the 2015 COP in Paris. The applications show how Random Exchange model not only may be used to predict collective decision-making outcomes but also deadlock when powerful actors attach high relative saliences to at least two issues on which they have opposite positions.
This article assesses the link between Members of the European Parliament's campaign salience and legislative behaviour, focusing on environmental issues. Environmental issues were discussed by several MEP candidates during the 2019 campaign and they were important for voters. Nonetheless, it is unclear whether MEPs were consistent with their campaign commitments in their parliamentary votes. MEPs’ environmental salience is computed by coding 50,393 campaign tweets and their legislative behaviour is assessed by examining roll-call votes on amendments related to emissions reduction. Results indicate that MEPs who focused more on environmental issues during the campaign cast more pro-environmental votes. This indicates that the European Parliament can exercise its representative role in domains relevant for EU policy.
The 1992 Maastricht Treaty guarantees European Union citizens the right to vote in local and European elections held in their country of residence. Yet, few mobile European Union citizens actually exercise this right. In France, which hosts the second-largest number of EU immigrants, only 26.2% of this population were registered to vote for the 2020 local elections. This article uses traditional explanations of immigrant electoral participation to understand the low electoral participation of foreign EU citizens. We combine census, electoral and local data to examine the determinants of registration rates for the nine largest EU nationalities in France. Our findings suggest that existing theories of resistance, transferability and exposure account for differences in electoral registration, while also suggesting that municipality size is an important factor.
How do backsliding government parties defend democratic backsliding in the European Parliament? Analyzing manually and large language model-coded data, I find that the backsliders’ arguments do not strongly reflect their illiberalism. Instead, they rely on alleging bias and misconduct by opponents and the advocacy of sovereignty, complemented by situational arguments about election results, Russia, and other member states, among others. Regression analyses tentatively suggest that increasing conflict between the backsliders and other groups helps explain the choice of arguments. The results raise the possibility of an underappreciated mechanism—pushing backsliders into making detrimental arguments—of European Parliament influence on European Union decisions on backsliding. They also indicate that the choice of arguments by backsliding government parties might be less strategically apt and more reactive than sometimes assumed.
Does the return of major warfare override identity-based constraints on European Union (EU) support? While post-functionalist theory suggests exclusive national identities act as a brake on integration, bellicist and social identity accounts argue that external threats generate functional demands, strengthening affective European orientations. Analyzing survey data from 16 countries collected 5 weeks after Russia’s 2022 invasion using a causal forest algorithm, we uncover a heterogeneous “rally” effect. Exclusive nationalists, typically EU skeptics, show the strongest positive association between threat perceptions and European pride, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe—a pattern mirrored in heightened levels of support for a common European army. We conclude that functional security demands can transform the EU from a perceived cultural threat into a necessary geopolitical shelter, even for traditional skeptics.
This article introduces the EUROBORD dataset. Starting from a Rokkanian conceptualization of polity formation as boundary formation, we propose a novel measurement of European integration as a combination of boundary closure and boundary control. We measure integration annually across 48 functional boundaries based on a coding of European Union (EU) law. By comparing our measure with existing measures of European integration, we provide support for its convergent validity and demonstrate its value added. We further present descriptive analyses of the historical development of the EU boundary and polity formation and propose a unified measure of European integration combining boundary control and boundary closure. The EUROBORD dataset offers the most comprehensive and fine-grained measure of European institutional integration to date.
This article examines the paradox of strong economic nationalism alongside continued support for European Union (EU) membership. Using original survey data from 2020 to 2025 and layered regression models, we assess how economic nationalist attitudes shape preferences for Romania's EU membership and test whether instrumental EU support moderates this negative relationship. This article explicitly models the interaction between economic nationalism, broader EU attitudes, and political context, refining existing frameworks by showing that economic nationalism does not have a uniform effect on support for EU membership. Instead, its impact is conditional, moderated by pro-EU orientations and susceptible to political activation during high-salience electoral periods.
Populist and Eurosceptic parties’ growing popular support has created a new transnational sociopolitical cleavage that challenges European integration. We hypothesize that disagreements over European integration drive cross-national conflict between party elites, and that party populism—which we show is less strongly related to Euroscepticism than is commonly believed—is an especially important contributor to cross-national elite conflict, independently of Euroscepticism or of the cultural issues debates that animate radical right parties’ domestic agendas. We substantiate our arguments by analyzing machine codings of tens of thousands of news reports of cross-national, elite-level, inter-party cooperation, and conflict between parties in 13 European Union member states between 2001 and 2019.
There has been a dramatic rise in voting for populist parties in Europe over the past thirty years. We assess the role of government labor market policy in dampening or provoking populist sentiment. Drawing from a panel of 134 elections from 1990 to 2021 and pooled cross-sectional data from eleven waves of the European Social Survey, we find evidence that populist parties fared worse where countries provided more robust income support to workers experiencing unemployment. The effect was stronger among those individuals who had experienced unemployment and among current and former trade union members. This suggests that the welfare cuts and labor-market reforms pursued since the early 2000's may have alienated vulnerable segments of the population and driven them toward populist parties.
The status of national minorities in Ukraine has become increasingly politicised, not only as Russia's justification for its invasions, but also due to Ukraine's bid for European Union membership. Minority rights reforms are central to EU accession, yet little is known about how EU-orientated citizens view policies of minority accommodation. We address this gap with an original quota-based online survey of 2100 respondents conducted in August 2023. Despite expectations that pro-EU orientations foster support for minority inclusion, we find the opposite: pro-European Ukrainians are opposed to diversity accommodations. These findings challenge assumptions about the normative influence of the EU in candidate states and raise critical questions about the coherence of EU enlargement policy, minority rights and post-conflict integration in Ukraine.
Solidarity and fairness in allocating refugee protection responsibilities is a central challenge in European asylum governance. The Dublin Regulation, assigning responsibility primarily to first countries of entry, has been criticised for exacerbating unequal burdens to member states. Yet systematic evidence on how Dublin transfers affect the distribution of responsibilities remains scarce. This article analyses Dublin statistics from 2008 to 2024 using a distribution key based on member states' size and wealth as normative benchmark. We assess whether Dublin transfers reduce or exacerbate asymmetries between member states. Contrary to common perceptions, Dublin transfers modestly reduce inequitable distribution of asylum responsibilities, resulting from geographic arrival patterns paired with partial implementation. These findings challenge prevailing critiques and offer insights for evaluating the EU's solidarity mechanism.
The European Union's (EU) Cohesion Policy is one of the main instruments to tackle the economic struggle of left-behind regions, however, only little is known about the awareness and the opinion of citizens towards this regional policy. This article examines how awareness of EU regional policies and spending preferences varies across occupations. We argue that differences in awareness across occupations are attributable to skill and responsibility differences and divergent work logics. Our analysis of a harmonized Eurobarometer dataset ( N = 82,365) provides evidence for differences in EU funding awareness and spending preferences across occupational groups, which correspond to their own material interests. In addition, citizens indicate preferences for funding decisions to be made at the most local level.
We introduce a computational method for identifying delegating and constraining provisions in European Union (EU) laws. Leveraging the syntactic structures employed by legislators, we developed a set of extraction rules applied through a custom-built computational linguistics pipeline. We run through the pipeline more than 600,000 legal sentences that we extracted from 9319 laws adopted between 1958 and 2019. The application performs very well vis-& aacute;-vis human annotation and outperforms transformer models. The produced patterns of authority delegation and constraint resonate with our knowledge of the policymaking and history of the EU. Our approach provides valuable insights for designing transparent and adaptable rule-based computational linguistic methods of legal text analysis. We also release the comprehensively annotated dataset and the fine-tuned transformer models developed for this task.
Although perceptions of party issue competence affect electoral choice, multilevel systems may condition their impact. Issue voting can depend on perceptions of which governmental level is responsible for policymaking. This article investigates the role of issue competence in European Parliamentary (EP) elections and whether voters account for the multilevel nature of governance by considering at what level, and how clearly, voters attribute responsibility. Beyond a general competence effect, competence may matter more when voters perceive Europe to be primarily responsible, and/or less when responsibility attributions are perceived as unclear/shared between the European and national level. We use data on the 2019 EP elections in 10 countries, assessing the impact of competence perceptions on four issues (N = 7348). Our findings show that issue competence matters in EP elections, and for the issues of Europe and the economy, even more so when voters attribute at least partial responsibility to the European level.
The theory of economic voting has been successfully applied to elections on different electoral levels. Less attention has been paid to the association between economic evaluations and the vote choice in European elections. In this study, we argue that economic perceptions can matter in European elections beyond rewarding or punishing the national incumbent. Instead of punishing incumbent parties, we examine electoral abstention and voting for Eurosceptic parties as a way of expressing dissatisfaction. Furthermore, we combine assessments of the national economy and the attribution of responsibility for these conditions to the European level. The findings show that voters are more likely to either abstain or to support Eurosceptic parties when they are more negative about the economic conditions in their country, but only if they attribute responsibility for these conditions to the European Union.
Why do heavily biased media campaigns sometimes fail to achieve expected persuasive effects in electoral contexts? While compelling at the national level, the argument that pro-Leave media bias explains Brexit outcome struggles to account for places such as London and other urban areas, where majorities voted Remain despite exposure to Euroskeptic media. To shed light on this puzzle, this article applies the "filter hypothesis" to examine how interpersonal communication mediates media effects. We extend this framework by incorporating group pressure mechanisms simulating opinion conformity, and building an agent-based model that compares theoretical mechanisms: direct versus mediated media effects, varying conformity levels, and different thresholds for network homogeneity and opinion similarity perception. Our findings show that models incorporating both mediated effects and group pressure mechanisms best replicate observed voting patterns and improve explanatory power.
This article examines the predictors of European Party Groups' bargaining success in internal negotiations within the European Parliament. It evaluates theories relating to pivotality in the policy space, agenda-setting power, strategic anticipation of interinstitutional bargaining, and internal group cohesion. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial because parliamentary agreements structure trilogue negotiations, ultimately affecting the European Union's legislative outcomes. Drawing on an original interview-based dataset covering 31 legislative proposals in the 9th Parliament (2019-2024), the study directly measures party group preferences and compares them to the positions adopted in parliamentary opinions. The findings show that mandates tend to follow the grand coalition median rather than the body's median as a whole, rapporteurs systematically benefit their groups, and internal cohesion unexpectedly reduces bargaining success. The negative impact of proximity to the Council suggests strategic positioning for trilogues, whereas alignment with the Commission and non-lead committee rapporteurships shows little effect. Together, the results provide a systematic account of bargaining in the modern European Parliament, offering a platform for future research.
This article analyses how and why individuals maintain or change their European solidarity over time using German panel data. I answer two questions: (1) Who maintains their level of European solidarity? (2) Do identity-based, value-based, or utilitarian approaches best explain change in European solidarity? I examine four dimensions of solidarity: territorial, fiscal, and welfare solidarity, and the support for European social citizenship. Despite COVID-19 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, 44-57% of German respondents maintained stable solidarity. Stability varied little across sociodemographic groups. Those who identified more with Europe and on the economic and transnationalist left were less likely to reduce their solidarity. Transnational political orientation is the main driver of intra-individual change in European solidarity. When individuals come to identify more with Europe, they increase their solidarity, whereas national identification has inconsistent effects. Utilitarian factors, including exposure to regional crises, show little effect on individual solidarity. The findings add nuance to identity-based and utilitarian explanations of how individuals develop and maintain European solidarity.
