Research

Publications

The role of procedural fairness in EU legitimacy: Lessons from the Spitzenkandidaten process” (with Andreas C. Goldberg and Pieter de Wilde) Forthcoming in: European Journal of Political Research.

The European Union (EU) is facing an ongoing challenge to its institutional and political legitimacy. The 2014 European Parliament elections marked a decisive step towards bringing the EU closer to its citizens by increasing the personalization of EU politics. Under the slogan ‘this time it’s different’, the idea was that the ‘winning’ lead candidate (Spitzenkandidat) of the EP elections would become the new President of the European Commission (EC). However, the selection of von der Leyen as EC President after the 2019 EP elections neglected this process. Inspired by procedural fairness theory, we investigate the impact of the Spitzenkandidaten process on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy in the EU. In a first study, we use observational survey data to examine whether Europeans reacted negatively when the Spitzenkandidaten process was ignored in 2019. In a second study, we investigate how the Spitzenkandidaten process could be salvaged to increase citizens’ satisfaction with EU democracy. We focus on the involvement of citizens through a primary system to select potential Spitzenkandidaten and the binding nature of the results of the EP elections to determine the EC President. Our two studies show the low impact of the Spitzenkandidaten process: Member state governments are able to override the results of the Spitzenkandidaten process without having to fear a (large) public backlash. Increasing citizen participation through a European primary does not affect this conclusion. In summary, we find very little evidence for the relevance of procedural fairness for citizens’ evaluation of the EU and the Spitzenkandidaten process.

Enter the trade war? European public opinion on trade restrictions against China (with Marius Dotzauer) Published in: The Review of International Political Economy(Paper)

This paper investigates how geopolitical factors shape individual preferences for export controls, focusing on EU–China trade in high-technology sectors. Supporters of a tougher stance toward China frequently use arguments about national security and economic containment. We examine how these arguments affect public opinion in European countries. We hypothesize that people display greater support for trade restrictions when the decision is motivated by security concerns rather than by the desire to slow China’s economic rise. We further argue that public support decreases if the economic costs of the decision are high. We test our theoretical expectations using a survey experiment with 8,770 respondents in five European countries: France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Sweden. Only a third of respondents support trade restrictions overall. Contrary to our theoretical expectations, security and economic containment frames generate similar levels of support. Our findings further indicate that citizens’ support declines as the costs to their country increase. These results advance our understanding of how geopolitical considerations shape trade attitudes by demonstrating the interaction of material and geopolitical factors. They suggest that domestic constituencies in Europe are not overly concerned about China’s rise and do not endorse a strategy of economic coercion.

Salience Matters: Crisis affectedness, elite cues and IO public legitimacy (with Bernd Schlipphak & Osman Sabri Kiratli) Published in: The Review of International Organizations (Paper)

What effects do international crises have on the public legitimacy of International Organizations (IOs)? It might be the case that such crises make issue-relevant IOs more relevant. As a result, the public legitimacy of those IOs becomes more dependent on citizens’ crisis-induced worries, leading to a more positive view of those IOs. Additionally, as the higher salience also leads to higher levels of elite communication regarding IOs, elite blaming of the IOs during crises results in direct negative effects on public legitimacy beliefs on IOs. Finally, both the valence and content of the elite discourse additionally moderate the positive effects of crisis-induced worries. Implementing survey experiments on public legitimacy beliefs on the WHO during the COVID-19 crisis with about 4400 respondents in Austria, Germany and Turkey, we find preliminary evidence for these expectations.

When are governmental blaming strategies effective? How blame, source and trust effects shape citizens’ acceptance of EU sanctions against democratic backsliding (with Bernd Schlipphak, Oliver Treib & Constantin Schäfer) Published in: Journal of European Public Policy (Paper)

Under what conditions do citizens consider external sanctions against their country to be appropriate? Based on the literature on blame shifting, we argue that citizens should become less likely to support external sanctions if their government defends itself, especially if it seeks to shift the blame to the external actors (blame effect). However, this effect may be moderated by which actor identifies and claims the norm violation (source effect) and by whether citizens trust their government (trust effect). We test our expectations by conducting a survey experiment on EU sanctions against democratic backsliding in six countries (n = 12,000). Our results corroborate the blame and source effects, but disconfirm the trust effect. These findings have important implications for the literatures on blame shifting and external sanctions as well as for how the EU and other International Organizations should design their sanctioning mechanisms.

Work in Progress

Selective Compliance: Domestic Pressure and the Effectiveness of the International Criminal Court (with Marius Dotzauer)

Can international courts make a difference in world politics? The International Criminal Court (ICC) has the task of sentencing individuals who are responsible for gravest crimes, but its success depends on the cooperation of its member states. It is frequently argued that domestic constituencies shape states’ willingness to comply with international law. We investigate the case of international arrest warrants and develop a theory of selective domestic pressure to comply. We argue that political considerations influence citizens’ support for international law and whether they expect their government to com-ply with it. We will test these arguments using a survey experiment that resembles recent real-world events, in which we manipulate the individual against whom an international arrest warrant has been issued. We investigate whether citizens expect their government to execute the arrest warrant regardless of whether the person is from a country that is considered to be a close ally or an enemy of the country. If our theory of selective compliance pressure is correct, this would show that the impact of domestic constituencies to compel states accountable to international law is weaker than often assumed.

Complex language and attitudes towards the European Union: Communicating European Commission Infringement Proceedings.

The European Union is the supranational institution with the most influence on national politics and one of the most publicly criticized. Faced with this increasing pressure, the EU needs to legitimize its’ actions to the general public. However, one crucial barrier to these attempts is the inherent difficulty of communicating the often highly technical decisions of the European Commission. As a result, communication attempts of the European Commission are exceedingly complex. What are the effects of this complex messaging on attitudes towards decisions of the European Commission? In a preregistered survey experiment (N=1200), I expose respondents to messages by the European Commission in both the original version and in a less complex but otherwise equivalent version. The results show that infringement procedures against Germany instigated by the European Commission are more likely to be accepted by german citizens when they are communicated in easy-to-understand language. Investigating the mechanisms behind that effect, I find that easier messaging is particularly effective for supporters of the European Union and for those interested in politics.

When does the authority of International Organizations matter for social legitimacy? Experimental evidence from Germany.

To explain the recent public contestation of International Organizations (IOs), researchers have often looked for micro-level explanations. Research has demonstrated that various factors influence attitudes towards IOs, ranging from characteristics of IOs themselves and the consequences of IO activity to contestation by political elites. However, citizens have very little ability or motivation to engage with information about these abstract issues. Instead, they might rely more on simple heuristics and rely on feelings of generalized trust or perceived familiarity of an institution. I argue that the effects of the proposed explanatory factors are conditional on individual psychological characteristics. I conducted a factorial survey experiment using a large sample of the German population (N=958), exposing participants to multiple fictitious IOs, their basic features, and domestic political elites’ reactions. Contrary to previous work on the effect of high international authority on individual attitudes, I find that German citizens do respond to information about international authority even in the presence of strong party cues. Moreover, these effects are more substantial for respondents motivated to engage in reflective reasoning. The results suggest that citizens can hold differentiated beliefs about IOs and do not always fall back on heuristic shortcuts.

Trust in the UN: The case of the Global Compact for Migration

The Global Compact for Migration has been one of the most hotly debated UN agreements in recent years. Despite being a non-binding agreement, it generated strong opposition both from some governments (such as the United States and Hungary) and from domestic actors (right-wing parties in European democracies). A key argument from opponents of the GCM was the perceived reduction of national sovereignty caused by the agreement. Using the timing of interviews as a quasi-randomization strategy, I demonstrate that the discussions around the agreement had a negative effect on trust towards the UN in Germany. In order to understand, if the design of the agreement could have caused that shift, I conduct a representative survey experiment in Germany. I show that, suprisingly, a binding GCM could have led to *increased* support. Together, my results indicate that increasing international authority can lead to higher trust in IOs.