Politicization, Responsiveness, and Public Support for EU Policies: The Case of Pesticides Regulation

Can responsiveness to citizens’ preferences enhance public support for EU policies on politicized issues? A growing body of research has explored the link between politicization and responsiveness, finding that the Commission often responds to contestation from civil society and media campaigns by revising its policies to make them more congruent with citizens’ preferences. But few studies have not examined whether such responsiveness leads in turn to enhanced public support for EU policies. We address this crucial but understudied issue by drawing on the results of a pair of linked survey experiments on public support for EU pesticides regulation in six EU Member States. The authorization and use of pesticides in the EU have become increasingly politicized over the past decade, intensified by the reauthorization of glyphosate in 2017. This hotly contested decision has given rise to widespread public distrust and political mobilization against EU pesticides regulation. The question then arises whether increased responsiveness to citizens’ preferences could enhance support for EU pesticides regulation, including the outcomes of authorization decisions on controversial substances such as glyphosate. The results of our experiments show that citizens have clear and strong preferences about how pesticides should be regulated, and that adoption of a policy package that respondents support substantially increases their willingness to accept a hypothetical glyphosate authorization decision, even where this runs counter to their prior expressed views. We interpret these results as providing strong evidence that increased responsiveness to citizens’ preferences on how decisions should be taken can indeed enhance support for EU policies, even on highly politicized issues such as pesticides regulation. The paper concludes by considering how far these findings can be expected to hold under real-world conditions of political contestation and competitive framing, and how far they may travel to other EU policy issues.