Contesting Implementation? The Effect of Justification Strategies on the Legitimacy of Compliance with EU Policies

No polity, be it national or supranational, can prevail if its community contests the legitimacy of its policies. Unlike conflicts over European integration, compliance with individual EU policies rarely reaches a high media profile, which has enabled domestic actors to implement policies away from the public eye. However, the politicization of the EU has fundamentally changed the politics of compliance, increasing public awareness about the impact of EU law on domestic policymaking. In such politicized settings, national governments could engage in different strategies to exonerate themselves from culpability when implementing contested supranational policies. Thus, justification strategies are an important source of responsiveness for national authorities. In this study, we examine how effectively national authorities use different justifications for complying with EU policies influences the perceived legitimacy for implementation. Whereas a common strategy is to shift the blame to the EU, citizens may perceive this as less legitimate if the responsibility of implementation lies in domestic institutions. Based on a survey experiment fielded among representative samples of the Dutch and German populations, we assess whether differences in government justification strategies affect the legitimacy of compliance. Our findings have implications for democratic accountability of domestic actors and the future of EU policymaking.