Research

Publications

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

The Failed Promise of the Spitzenkandidaten System: How the EC President Selection Influences Citizens’ Satisfaction with EU Democracy (with Andreas Goldberg and Pieter De Wilde)

The European Union, and even more so the European Parliament (EP), is facing an ongoing institutional and political legitimacy challenge. In this context, the 2014 European elections marked a decisive step towards bringing the EU closer to its citizens by increasing the personalization of EU politics. Following the slogan ‘this time it’s different’, the idea was that the ‘winning’ lead candidate of the EP elections would become the new President of the European Commission (EC), the so-called Spitzenkandidaten process. While this expectation was fulfilled in 2014, the selection of von der Leyen as EC President after the 2019 EP elections neglected this process. In this paper, we first examine the extent to which this overruling of the Spitzenkandidaten system by the member states has affected people's satisfaction with the Spitzenkandidaten process and EU democracy more broadly. We take advantage of an `unexpected event during survey design' by using a panel wave data collection (from 10 EU member states) that was in the field when the (unexpected) selection of von der Leyen took place. Second, we examine how the (failed) Spitzenkandidaten process can be salvaged in order to increase citizens' satisfaction with EU democracy. We focus on two aspects, namely the earlier involvement of citizens through a primary system to select potential Spitzenkandidaten and the binding nature of the EP elections result to determine the EC President. To this end, we collect original experimental data (in 5 member states) in early 2024 in the run-up to the next EP elections.

Cutting Ties in the Global Economy: European Public Opinion on Balancing Strategic Autonomy with Material Costs (with Marius Dotzauer)

How do voters in liberal market economies perceive the growing geopolitical tensions in the global economy? We argue that people face a dilemma between reducing critical dependencies from strategic competitors and avoiding material costs caused by geopolitical strategies. People might support their government’s decision to cut ties with a competing power, when prompted that independence from potentially hostile countries is important to advance strategic autonomy. Realizing that the desire of greater independence will produce significant costs might reduce peoples’ support for economic hard play. We examine these theoretical arguments in the context of the relationship between various European countries and China. We collect original observational survey data in five European countries and conduct survey experiments to test how people deal with the trade-offs between greater independence and its’ material repercussions, using trade in security-relevant high-tech products as an example. The paper contributes to a growing literature on geoeconomics by clarifying how domestic constituencies perceive ongoing efforts to reorganize global economic relations.

Consequences of complex communication by the European Commission

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.

Information and Motivation: How do attitudes towards International Organizations develop?

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.