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Multi-Level Politics in Action: How National Elections Make European Policies More Responsive to Public Opinion

European Politics
European Union
Quantitative
Decision Making
Euroscepticism
Public Opinion
Michele Scotto di Vettimo
Kings College London
Michele Scotto di Vettimo
Kings College London

Abstract

This paper analyses the link between policy-specific preferences for European integration and European Union (EU) policies between 1994 and 2024. The EU institutional arrangement enables national-level factors to influence the link between public opinion and EU-level policies. I argue that EU policy-making is skewed towards public preferences of those states where national elections are closer in the future. To support this claim, I use a Bayesian item response theory approach to construct policy area-specific series of public support for EU integration starting from 266 Eurobarometer questions. Then, I collect the texts of all EU legislative acts tabled between 1994 and 2024, and use a machine learning algorithm to identify clauses that expand EU authority. The results indicate that EU authority expansion is more associated with average public support for policy integration in a specific area when national-level public preferences are weighted by the proximity to national elections. This paper contributes to the existing literature on the opinion-policy link in the EU under territorial representation by showing the key role that national elections play in EU-level policy-making.