Public Opinion About Differentiated Policy Implementation in the EU: Blame, Responsibility and Punishment

The implementation of EU policy has always resulted in a patchwork across the member states. Against this background, the EU has very limited tools to enforce compliance with the admissible interpretations and implementations of EU rules. This paper focuses on public opinion as one salient feature of the political background of conflicts over policy implementation in the EU. Surprisingly, public opinion has received limited attention in the literatures on EU compliance and implementation: existing studies are mostly content to relate public opinion on general issues of European integration to aggregate compliance outcomes. In contrast, we propose to analyze public opinion over implementation and enforcement conflicts directly, focusing on questions of blame distribution (who is to blame when a possible infringement of EU rules occurs), responsibility (who is expected to enforce the rules) and punishment (what punishments are considered legitimate and under what conditions). We study these questions with the help of survey experiments conducted in EU countries that have recently been a target of high-profile EU enforcement actions (such as Poland) and old member states with good compliance records (such as The Netherlands). Building on diverse literatures from political psychology and public policy, we aim to identify how citizens distribute blame, responsibility and legitimacy when Brussels and the member states collide over issues of policy implementation. The results from the study bring theoretical insight about understanding the politics of differentiated policy implementation in the EU and have practical implications about the design and conduct of enforcement processes and institutions in the EU.