Since the early days of integration, the debate about the EU’s legitimacy has been dominated by output legitimacy, with the assumption that the EU’s capacity to deliver positive policy outcomes would garner public support for the project. For the past 6 years, the economic crisis has been severely straining this mechanism, while dramatically increasing media and political attention on the EU. This provided citizens with a specific and highly visible role of the EU in how it handled the economic crisis. This paper investigates the impact of the EU’s response to the crisis and in how far this has changed public support for integration. First, we examine potential changes in the effects of individual-level characteristics and economic country-level. Second, we study specific support for the EU’s response to the crisis to evaluate whether the crisis has actually decreased the EU’s output legitimacy. We use Eurobarometer data with multi-level models.
