Can Policy Framing Repair Trust in the EU? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Spain

Trust in European institutions has been steadily declining in the past decade. Nonetheless, only few works inquire what the EU could do in order to repair trust and combat Euroscepticism. Most of these, however, propose grand reforms of the EU architecture that are likely to encounter important opposition from member states and their citizens. In this paper we focus on a less costly strategy that EU institutions have in order to regain the confidence of the European citizenry: institutional framing. We propose an experimental design that describes the EU using different trustworthiness dimensions – ability, integrity, benevolence – in order to disentangle which of these are likely to increase supranational trust. We find that the three treatment conditions have little impact on supranational trust. However, we find that framing EU institutions as able substantially increases trust. Our findings have important implications for research on European integration and Euroscepticism, by showing how EU institutions can reach some of the most disaffected and estranged parts of its electorate.