The Effects of EU Enforcement on EU attitudes: Results from a Multiple Unexpected Events Analysis

The importance and contestation of EU enforcement actions is rising. While existing literature has studied the effects of EU enforcement on public opinion, mostly with the help of survey experiments, it is yet unclear whether the public notices and reacts to the enforcement actions undertaken by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice in the real world. This paper uses a pre-registered multiple unexpected events analysis to study the effects of infringement procedures and court decisions on attitudes towards European integration. To do that, I identify all relevant infringement and court decisions for the period 2010-2025 and match the dates with all comparative public opinion surveys (Eurobarometer, European Social Survey, etc.) When the relevant decisions come in-between the data collection dates for the survey for the particular affected country, one can identify the effect of the decision on public opinion by comparing attitudes before and after, after modelling any trends or differences in samples. I conduct the analysis for the universe of such unexpected events since 2010. The findings of this paper contribute to the study of EU enforcement, European public opinion, and the reception of actions by non-majoritarian supranational institutions more generally.