Legislative Empowerment and the Policy-Opinion Link in Social Policy

• In Event: Congruence and Democratic Responsiveness

Abstract

The scholarship on political representation advances several hypotheses on how to increase representation quality. The most commonly studied explanatory factors of political representation concern the electoral system and focus on (a) electoral proportionality, and (b) electoral marginality. The role of legislative-executive balance of powers has only recently been advanced as an important institutional factor behind the policy-opinion link (Wlezien 2012, Hobolt & Klemmensen 2008). The European Union is the perfect case to empirically test this under-studied hypothesis on the importance of legislative checks-and-balances. This is because the European Parliament has progressively been empowered at every round of Treaty reform and thus offers the necessary variation in legislative empowerment to test this argument. The study exploits the introduction of the codecision procedure in order to test the role of legislative-executive relations in fostering representation. The analysis leverages text data of 75 directives and regulations in social and employment policy between 1990 and 2008. EU policy outputs in the social and employment domain are scaled on the pro-worker vs. pro-business dimension via crowdsourcing and then compared to public opinion preferences on employment policy. The analysis exploits the uneven application of codecision to social and employment policies post-1999, and adopts a differences-in-differences approach to causally identify the impact of the introduction of codecision on the nature of policy responsiveness. The study is a unique and innovative contribution to the representation literature : first, it adopts state-of-the-art text analysis methods to explore the extent to which EU social policy is responsive to public opinion; and second it tests the role of legislative empowerment, an under-studied predictor of the policy-opinion link. The study also contributes to the European integration and democratic deficit scholarship in a) testing whether supranational political systems can adequately deal with redistributive policies; and b) testing whether codecision has changed the nature of voters' representation in the EU.

Author

• Miriam Sorace, London School of Economics