Good Europeans? How European identity and costs interact to explain politician attitudes towards compliance with European Union law

ABSTRACT

Does European identity increase politicians’ support for compliance with European Union (EU) law? Adopting a political psychology approach, this study for the first time examines the effect of European identity on politicians’ attitudes toward compliance with EU law. I offer a cognitive-interactionist theory and argue that European identity, compliance costs and the interaction between identity and costs shape actors’ support for compliance. Using an original survey of German parliamentarians, I show that European identity and the level of compliance costs are both important predictors of compliance attitudes, and European identity moderates the effect of costs on support for compliance. This study facilitates a new research agenda by bringing the individual politician to the study of compliance with EU law, and builds a bridge between instrumental and normative models of compliance.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive-interactionism
• compliance
• European identity
• European Union law
• political psychology

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Funding for this research was provided by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and the Ohio State University. I am thankful to Jeremy Richardson, Berthold Rittberger and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. I am also indebted to David Andrews, Richard Herrmann, Josh Kertzer, Jon Pevehouse, Brian Rathbun, Alex Thompson, Alex Wendt, participants at the 2014 conference on EU Studies at the EU Center of California and at the 2012 annual convention of the International Studies Association for their helpful suggestions. M. Nedim Bayram and Karos Bayram supported me through multiple drafts, but passed too soon to see the publication of this article.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALS

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the author's website at burcubayram.net.

Notes

1 The literature on compliance is too large to cite here in full.

2 On general relationship between attitudes and behavior, see Ajzen and Fishbein (2005).

3 Note that surveys of legislators or executives generally rely on relatively smaller samples (e.g., Damgaard 1980; Dionne 2010; Zoco 2006).

4 Other studies (e.g., Deupas) also reply on party affiliation to capture political representativeness. http://www.change-centre.net/foundation/ (accessed 10 October 2014). Information on the demographic characteristics of the respondents can be found in the online appendix.https://www.btg-bestellservice.de/pdf/80140000.pdf (accessed 10 October 2014).

5 Twenty-ninth annual report on monitoring the application of EU law [COM(2012) 714] at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-1280_en.htm (accessed 10 October 2014).

6 Cronbach's α is a measure of a scale's reliability that ranges from 0 to 1. The closer the α value to 1, the more reliable the index.

7 http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/index_en.htm (accessed 10 October 2013).

8 Historically, Social Democrats and Liberals have generally been supportive of European integration, the Greens have gone back and forth and the Left Party has opposed the capitalist economic model underlying the free trade area.

9 The thresholds for grouping participants into low, medium and high identifiers are based on percentiles. The European identity variable is slightly skewed to the right. Therefore, combined scores on the European identity index are separated as Low < 50 per cent; Medium < 75 per cent; High 75–100 per cent. If I group responses using 33, 66 and 100 percentiles, results largely remain stable. The main substantive change occurs in the size of the difference in mean support for compliance between low and medium identifiers, which is still statistically significant.

10 If the treatments had not been taken seriously because of their hypothetical nature, there would not be a statistically significant effect for costs. Additionally, support for compliance in the presence of costs is about 24 per cent lower than the average support for compliance measured prior to the presentation of the experimental treatment in the dispositional part of the survey instrument with the global compliance index.

11 All other variables are held constant at their means or specified values. Predicted probabilities are calculated using Stata's margins command (Long and Freese 2006).

12 More information on the models can be found in the Online Appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

A. Burcu Bayram

Biographical note

A. Burcu Bayram is currently an assistant professor of political science at The University of Texas at Arlington, USA.