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Do voters want domestic politicians to scrutinize the European Union?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2021

Roman Senninger Open the ORCID record for Roman Senninger [Opens in a new window]  and
Daniel Bischof Open the ORCID record for Daniel Bischof [Opens in a new window]
Roman Senninger*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Daniel Bischof
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: rsenninger@ps.au.dk
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Abstract

In light of important political events that go beyond the nation state (e.g., migration, climate change, and the coronavirus pandemic), domestic politicians are increasingly pressured to scrutinize and speak out on European policy-making. This creates a potential trade-off between allocating effort to domestic and supranational affairs, respectively. We examine how citizens perceive legislator involvement in European Union (EU) politics with a pre-registered conjoint experiment in Germany. Our results show that Members of Parliament (MPs) are not disadvantaged when allocating effort to European affairs as compared to local and national affairs. In addition, voters tend to prefer MPs who engage in EU policy reform over those who do not. As demand for legislator involvement in European politics is on the rise, we provide empirical evidence that MPs can fulfill this demand without being disadvantaged by the electorate.

Keywords

European politics and integrationvoting behaviorsurvey experimentcausal inference
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , April 2023 , pp. 410 - 418
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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Footnotes

The design of this study was pre-registered at OSF. A link to the pre-registration plan is part of the Supplementary materials.

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Supplementary material: Link

Senninger and Bischof Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DXEZAM
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Senninger and Bischof supplementary material

Senninger and Bischof supplementary material

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