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

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.