Does EMU Affect Clarity of Responsibility in Domestic Economic Voting? An Experimental Analysis

This paper focuses on the Europeanisation of national electoral politics analyzing the relationship between voting behavior in national elections and supranationalization of economic policies. It uses experimental data from an on-line survey conducted simultaneously in six EU countries (Belgium, Ireland, Greece, Germany, Portugal and Spain) in January 2019 to investigate whether, and under which conditions, the transfer of economic responsibilities to the EU level generated by EMU, and politicized by the economic crisis, has affected economic voting among European citizens. The literature on economic voting has found that voters are less likely to hold the national government accountable for the country’s economic performance when responsibility for economic policy is blurred. Indeed, there is some evidence that both EMU itself and the increased politicization of the EU have made citizens more aware of supranational constrains on economic policies, and consequently reduced economic voting in national elections. On the other hand, however, recent research on voting behavior during the Great Recession has shown that economic voting was stronger during this period than before. The apparent inconsistency of these results calls for a better assessment of the causal link between clarity of responsibility and economic voting, and for the investigation of potential moderator factors. The use of experimental data, generated by the ERC MAPLE project, allows us to overcome the multiple endogeneity problems that lie in the analysis of the relations between responsibility attribution, economic perceptions and the vote and establish the causal mechanisms that in observational literature are only theorized. Our experimental design allows us to look at the (relative) weight of economic considerations on the vote calculus in different contexts of clarity of responsibility, and to explore the relevance of multiple moderator factors.