Change to Stay the Same? German European Preference Formation During the COVID-19 Crisis

ABSTRACT

In 2020, the German government supported the COVID-19 recovery fund ‘Next Generation EU’, which according to many observers is breaking with the taboo of joint EU debt liability. In this article, we analyse whether this decision marks a programmatic shift towards fiscal integration, taken in isolation by the Chancellor, or whether it can be reconciled with higher-level principles that guided the Chancellor’s previous European policies? Our analysis builds on a synthetic framework combining a multi-level principal-agent account with ideational components. The empirical analysis of Bundestag debates and original public opinion data reveal that the support for ‘Next Generation EU’ neither breaks with the Chancellor’s established ‘conservational-pragmatic’ approach to EU policy-making, nor separates the Chancellor from the preferences of the Bundestag and the public. Content analyses show how the government and its supporting camp in the Bundestag justified the apparent policy shift, underlining a strong agreement towards strengthening the EU in times of an unseen crisis, while at the same time revealing some noteworthy partisan differences.

Acknowledgements

We thank Femke van Esch, Fabian Engler, Reimut Zohlnhöfer and the anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Pascal Mounchid provided very fine research support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 National preference formation can be divided into the process and the output thereof, i.e., the preferences or ideal points, which the country’s representatives defend at the European negotiation table. Following Bueno de Mesquita (2004), we do not make a distinction between positions and preferences or ideal points (cf. also Thomson et al. 2012; Wasserfallen et al. 2019).

2 Note that our understanding of corridors differs slightly from Finke (2009, 486), for whom the corridor for governmental positions is constituted by the economic characteristics of a country. Our corridor, however, is more political as it is determined by players in the political game. Of course, these players’ preferences may well be influenced by economic considerations.

3 Private information confirms that the Chancellor informed a selected group of Bundestag members about her recovery fund plans, not least to check whether the parliamentary majority would back the policy shift.

4 In the analysis, we perform listwise deletion for missing values.

5 Using survey experiments Baccaro, Bremer, and Neimanns (2021, 2022) show in two recent studies that Italian respondents are more likely to support an Italian exit from the Eurozone when EU fiscal support is conditional on structural reforms.

6 All quotes translated by the authors. See appendix for German originals.

7 The question was worded as follows: ‘As you may know, the EU member states agreed on a pandemic recovery plan in July 2020. In broad terms, this plan provides that the European Commission is, for the first time, allowed to raise debt on the financial markets for a limited amount of time and to a limited extent, and to distribute it to the member states under certain conditions. The money is supposed to be targeted on investments in forward-looking technologies. Do you support this measure?’

Additional information

Funding

This work was generously supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement 822419. The public opinion surveys were funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG – German Research Foundation) under Germany‘s Excellence Strategy – EXC-2035/1–390681379.

Notes on contributors

Max Heermann

Max Heermann is a doctoral researcher in the Research group for International Politics at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Germany. Address for correspondence: Post BOX 83, Universitätsstraße 10, 78457 Konstanz, Germany; email [email protected]

Dirk Leuffen

Dirk Leuffen is Professor of Political Science/International Politics at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz. Address for correspondence: Post BOX 83, Universitätsstraße 10, 78457 Konstanz, Germany; email [email protected]

Fabian Tigges

Fabian Tigges is a graduate in Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz and in International Political Economy, University of Warwick. Address for correspondence: Post BOX 83, Universitätsstraße 10, 78457 Konstanz, Germany; email [email protected]