This workshop is part of the Economic History Workshop series in the Department of Economics and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

This workshop is part of the Economic History Workshop series in the Department of Economics and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

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The European Union (EU) is facing one of the rockiest periods in its existence. Not often in its history has it looked so economically fragile, so unsecure about how to protect its borders, so divided over how to tackle the crisis of legitimacy facing its institutions, and so under assault of Eurosceptic parties. The unprecedented levels of integration in recent decades have led to increased public contestation, yet at the same the EU is more reliant on public support for its continued legitimacy than ever before. Eurosceptic parties are expected to increase their vote share in the upcoming European Parliamentary elections, and the outcome of the Brexit vote provides glimpse of what could happen when Euroscepticism hardens.

In this talk, I discuss the role of public opinion in the European integration process. Based on my 2018 book Euroscepticism and the Future of European Integration, I outline a novel theory of public opinion that stresses the deep interconnectedness between people’s views about European and national politics. It suggests that public opinion cannot simply be characterized as either Eurosceptic or not, but rather consists of different types. This is important because these types coincide with fundamentally different views about the way the EU should be reformed and which policy priorities should be pursued. These types also have very different consequences for behaviour in elections and referenda. Euroscepticism is such a diverse phenomenon because the Eurozone crisis has exacerbated the structural imbalances within the EU. As the economic and political fates of member states diverged, people’s experiences with and evaluations of the EU and national political systems also grew further apart. The heterogeneity in public preferences has implications for the European project, as it makes a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing Euroscepticism unlikely to be successful.

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Catherine E. De Vries is a Westendijk Chair and Professor of Political Behaviour in Europe at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she also acts as the Director of the VU Interdisciplinary Center for European Studies. In addition, she is an Associate Member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford and an affiliated Professor of Political Science at the University of Essex. Finally, she serves a scientific advisor the eupinions project of the Bertelsmann Foundation and as a board member of the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

Co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution

Recent experimental evidence finds that the decision maker in a collective decision making entity with proposal power attracts a disproportionate amount of the blame or reward by those materially affected by these decisions. In the case of coalition governments evidence suggests that voters have heuristics for assigning responsibility for economic outcomes to individual parties and that they tend to disproportionately direct the economic vote toward the Prime Minister party. This essay demonstrates that voters also identify the Finance Minister party as an agenda setter on economic issues depending on whether the coalition context exaggerates or mutes its perceived agenda power. We define cabinet context as the extent to which coalition parties take issue ownership for particular policy areas. We find that when decision making is compartmentalized, voters perceive the finance minister as having agenda power and hence it receives a relatively larger economic vote; in more “diffuse” cabinet contexts it is the PM Party that is attributed responsibility for the economy.

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He draws on theory, experiments and public opinion analysis to understand how citizens solve decision-making challenges. This includes looking at how citizens use information shortcuts to make decisions. For example in ‘Context and Economic Expectations: When Do Voters get it Right?’ (British Journal of Political Science, 2010), he demonstrates how information shortcuts result in quite accurate expectations regarding price fluctuations in 12 European countries. One of his current areas of interest is the micro-foundations of cheating and unethical behaviour. He has run real effort tax compliance experiments designed to understand who cheats at taxes, the results of which are summarized in ‘Why We Cheat?’ (currently under review). An extension of this project examines tax compliance in different tax regimes.

Ray has served as Associate Editor of the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Experimental Political Science. He is one of the founders of the European Political Science Association and the International Meeting on Behavioural Science (IMESBESS), and he is currently Vice President of the Midwest Political Science Association. In 2015, Ray was selected as a member of the UK Cabinet Office Cross-Whitehall Trial Advice Panel to offer Whitehall departments technical support in designing and implementing controlled experiments to assess policy effectiveness. He was recently nominated to the Evidence in Governance and Politics network.

This event is co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution.

Romain Wacziarg is a professor of economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The paper that he will be presenting is co-authored by Guillaume Blanc, Brown University.

This talk is part of the Economic History Seminar Series, and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.