Who Believes the Eurozone Crisis is Over?

• In Event: International Economic Integration in Domestic Contestation

Abstract

The eurozone is ostensibly going through an economic recovery after the worst recession since the Great Depression. Yet despite the positive aggregate economic numbers there remains much variation in who in the crisis-hit countries is experiencing the recovery and economic optimism and maintains trust in the political system, and trust in the EU. This is also evidenced by the rise in anti-establishment parties in two of the major Southern European countries that were hard hit by the crisis (Italy and Spain), as well as enduring skepticism of EU-supported policies in Portugal. In this paper we examine whether citizens actually perceive their country is in recovery or not, and conditional on their beliefs, we ask them to attribute blame or credit of their country’s economic performance. We hypothesize that economic assessments and trust in these various institutions depends on individuals’ benchmarking of the recovery, and that this in turn affects policy views and trust in domestic versus EU institutions.

We will test whether framing the recovery relative to different temporal benchmarks (comparing the country’s current economic status to the trough of the crisis or peak performance before the crisis) and performance benchmarks (emphasizing the country’s economic growth and employment performance for key demographic sectors) affects assessment of the economy and various political parties. We will also measure attribution of credit (blame) for the country’s economic recovery (stagnation), by randomly making salient various policies pursued in response to the crisis. We then follow up with post-treatment questions regarding policy preferences and trust in domestic versus EU institutions. To do this we will field surveys and embed these experiments in large nationally representative surveys of three Southern European countries which were hit by the crisis (Italy, Portugal, and Spain). The results will help understand variation in long-term trust in the EU, given the controversial role that EU institutions have played in Southern Europe’s economic crisis.

Authors

• Alexander Kuo, University of Oxford

• Ignacio Jurado, University of York