The Democracy Deficit and Mass Support for an EU-Wide Governmentстатья из журнала
Аннотация: show that when citizens perceive that they are unrepresented, their support for the EU is reduced independent of economic perceptions; this reduction is especially strong in nations with well-functioning institutions. The study (1) suggests that transition and EU analyses converge on the import of regimes' democratic performance in shaping regime support; (2) pro? poses guidelines to model mass support for new institutions; (3) con? tains disquieting implications for Europe's political integration and its eastward enlargement. The democracy deficit of the European Union increasingly receives attention in the scholarly literature (Blondel, Sinnott, and Svensson 1998; Scharpf 1999; Katz and Wessels 1999). Surprisingly, despite the fact that these discussions focus on whether publics are represented by the EU, no crossnational study examines whether citizens feel represented by the EU. Neither do prior studies examine whether such views affect EUsupport. This article addresses these issues. Prior research about mass support for European integration often points to economic factors to explain why citizens support the EU (Eichenberg and Dalton 1993; Gabel 1998). From the perspective of demo? cratic representation, such a focus implies an output-based conception of representation: citizens presumably base their evaluations of a regime on its capacity to deliver desired goods. However, democratic representation also means that a system provides democratic procedures for expressing mass preferences (Dahl 1989). Empirically, transition research in Central Europe shows, for example, that citizens are quite concerned with the quality of the democratic process independently of regimes' economic performance. In turn, such procedural evaluations shape mass support for new systems, at times exceeding the influence of economic evaluations (Evans and Whitefield 1995; Mishler and Rose 2001). Our first goal is therefore to probe whether mass support for the EU is lowered when citizens perceive the EU as being unresponsive to their preferences. A second argument develops an insight advanced by Sanchez-Cuenca (2000) who suggests that higher levels of corruption at the national level directly increase EU-support. However, we argue that the quality of na? tional institutions mediates the effect of the perceived democracy deficit on EU-support. Accordingly, we expect perceptions of under-representation to reduce mass support for the EU when citizens reside in nations with supe? rior institutions. One theoretical contribution of this article is to show the influence of
Год издания: 2002
Авторы: Robert Rohrschneider
Издательство: Wiley
Источник: American Journal of Political Science
Ключевые слова: European Union Policy and Governance, Electoral Systems and Political Participation, Fiscal Policies and Political Economy
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 46
Выпуск: 2
Страницы: 463–463