Although political parties are key actors, recent studies report remarkable differences between partisan and public support for European integration. In this study, we investigate whether legal European integration incentivizes political parties to sacrifice responsiveness to the concerns of the public for policymaking responsibility to European integration. We use the ideological location and governmental experience of political parties to explain differences between partisan and public support for European integration in the member states of the EU. We further classify and interact the policy characteristics of 50,000 EU legislative acts to measure legal European integration by their bureaucratic, centralizing and parliamentary features with the ideological location and governmental experience of political parties. We expect that ruling parties, which are more centrally located and have more governmental experience, are more in favor of bureaucratic, centralizing and non-parliamentary legal European integration, which however find less public approval. Over time, this may explain the declining public support of ruling parties and the rise of periphery Euroskpetic parties when legal European integration is becoming more bureaucratic, centralizing and non-parliamentary.
