How Do European Citizens Form their Views of the EU Public Administration? Exploring the Role of Heuristics

Abstract

Complex multi-level governance systems face a variety of challenges. As one of the most prominent multi-level administrative systems, the EU has experienced a legitimacy crisis for several years, with many citizens displaying skeptical or even hostile views of European integration in general and the EU’s central bureaucracy specifically. Although citizens often hold such negative views of the EU public administration, they have almost no direct interactions with or substantive knowledge of this institution. Given these circumstances, we ask: How do individual citizens form their views of the EU bureaucracy? Our theory suggests that citizens frequently use mental shortcuts, specifically the “representativeness heuristic,” to make inferences about the EU’s administrative institutions. Empirically, we focus on the case of Romania and show that perceptions of domestic central and local bureaucracies are a significant predictor of perceptions of EU bureaucracies. These findings have wide-ranging academic and practical-political implications. * Please do not cite or circulate without permission by the author. The most recent version of this paper may be obtained at the following URL: http://www.janvogler.net/EU Public Administration.pdf Acknowledgments Helpful comments have been provided by Tanja Börzel, Nick Clark, Catherine De Vries, Mat McCubbins, Paul Taggart, Simon Usherwood, and Erika van Elsas. Furthermore, I would like to thank participants of presentations at Duke University, MPSA’s annual conference, and Central European University. The Duke University Department of Political Science, Mathew McCubbins, the Mercatus Center, and the Institute for Humane Studies provided generous funding for the data collection.