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

The politics of the EU are commonly characterized as a two-level game (Putnam, 1988): absent politicization, domestic publics are largely unaware of what happens in the Brussel’s bubble. Hence, the substantive actions of their leaders during EU-level negotiations can deviate from what these leaders communicate to their constituents in domestic arenas. While from a democratic and accountability perspective what leaders do at the EU-level and say nationally should be interconnected, few studies have explored to what extent this is indeed the case: the literature on responsiveness generally looks either at concrete position-taking (e.g. Schneider, 2018; Wratil, 2018), or the public legitimation thereof (Rauh etal, 2019). Moreover, there still are significant knowledge gaps regarding the specific mechanisms that link public opinion to the (domestic legitimation of) policy positions at the EU level (Zhelyazkova et al., 2019).

This project seeks to address these knowledge gaps by drawing on two novel data sets on (1) national positions in 40+ negotiations on EMU reform during 2010-2015 (Wasserfallen et al, 2019) and (2) cognitive maps of the publicly communicated policy ideas of national leaders during the same time (Van Esch et al., 2018). Using this data, we seek to establish to what extent national leaders diverge from or honour their public positions during EU negotiations. In addition, we analyse the role that different economic and political conditions play. More specifically, we examine the extent to which policy-specific predictors, like general government debts and deficits, as well as politicization-related predictors, such as issue salience, polarization of public opinion, and mobilization of Eurosceptic parties may explain the level of divergence between public communication and negotiation position. By gauging the importance of these different elements for the position-cueing (dis)congruence of EU leaders, this project speaks to vital questions of democratic accountability and responsiveness in multi-level EU governance.