Talking cheap, or speaking Euro? EU leaders and the congruence between their actual and communicated positions in EMU negotiations

Since Putnam’s (1988) seminal article on two-level games, EU scholars widely recognize that EU negotiations play out across multiple levels, and that citizen attention to the actions of their representatives at the EU level depends largely on the politicization of the issue at hand. Given this public attention deficit, the substantive actions of political leaders representing citizens during EU-level negotiations may deviate from what these leaders communicate to their constituents in domestic arenas. From a democratic and accountability perspective, what leaders communicate to their national constituents should reflect what their negotiators they do at the EU-level. Yet few studies have explored to what extent this is indeed the case: the literature on responsiveness generally looks either at concrete position-taking and how it relates to public opinion or the public legitimation of EU policy making and there still are significant knowledge gaps regarding the specific mechanisms that link public opinion to the policy positions of actors at the EU level. This project will analyse to what extent high political leaders’ communication at the domestic level reflects the positions forwarded by their negotiators during EU-level negotiations. We examine expectations derived from these two alternative perspectives by combining two novel data sets: (1) a dataset with national positions in 40+ negotiations on EMU reform during 2010-2015 (Wasserfallen et al. 2019) and (2) a set of cognitive maps of publicly communicated policy ideas of national leaders during the same time (Van Esch et al. 2018). Using this data, we seek to establish the extent to which national leaders diverge from, or honour their public positions during EU negotiations and analyse the role that different economic and political conditions play in this. This paper has important implications for questions of democratic accountability, leadership and responsiveness in multi-level EU governance.