Spain as the EU’s ‘champion’ in Latin America: elites, government trustworthiness, and free trade

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses attitudes around the projection of the EU among Latin American elites, namely the determinants of support for a Free Trade Agreement between the two regions and the trustworthiness of the EU government. We take as data elite surveys conducted in 15 Latin American countries (2014–2019) and consider sociodemographics, ideology, support for democracy, views of foreign powers, exports to the EU, and electoral democracy. Results show that ideology and support for democracy are key determinants of support for an interregional FTA, and that the trustworthiness of governments in the US, China, and Spain covary with attitudes toward the EU. The latter (trust in the government in Spain) proves to be the main driver and, furthermore, its impact is conditional on the economic strength (observed as exports) of the EU: wherever the EU is not a strong economic actor in Latin America, trust in the Spanish government does nothing but improve the image of the EU.

KEYWORDS:

• Elites
• government trustworthiness
• FTA
• EU
• Latin America

Disclosure statement

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

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2023.2271846.

Notes

1. Lower Chambers in the case of bicameralism. For more information on the dataset see: https://oir.org.es/pela/en/

2. Not national governments, but the European guiding authorities (that is, the Executive), regardless of the name appearing in the questionnaire. This question is one of a battery where legislators are also asked about the trustworthiness of the governments of the US, Russia, China, and Spain.

3. The levels of confidence that LAC legislators express in the Spanish government vary from 66.7% (Uruguay in 2015) to 91.4% (Dominican Republic in 2017). There seems to be no impact on these percentages based on the government’s ideology. In 2017, for example, 86.2% of Nicaraguan legislators, mostly left-leaning, expressed confidence in the Spanish government, which was led at that time by conservative Mariano Rajoy. In comparison, during 2018, 84.9% of Colombian legislators, mostly right-leaning, voiced trust in the current Spanish government led by socialist Pedro Sánchez.

4. The two questions on trustworthiness correlate positively (0.51), as expected. In the paper, we build the case that views on the EU in LAC are in part driven by attitudes toward specific EU members, especially Spain. A positive perception of the EU might have a feedback effect on the perception of EU members, but in the case of Spain we expect the causality to extend from that single EU member to the EU as a whole. Unlike other EU countries, Spain has maintained a long-term special relationship with LAC (Ayuso Pozo 2014).

5. For more information on the descriptives of the variables and details of the analysis, see the supplementary file.

6. Although the trade share of the EU might seem low when compared to countries like China or the US, commerce (and by extension FTAs) is the best indicator for operationalization of economic ties (hard power). Variations between countries are not small: shares of exports range from 3.5% in El Salvador to 22.6% in Costa Rica. Still, we ran alternative models with exports recorded by whether the EU was the first to seventh trading partner of each country. Results did not significantly differ from those displayed in Table 2.