Crises and Responsiveness: Analysing German Preference Formation During the Eurozone Crisis
| Author | Dirk Leuffen,Hanno Degner |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919864902 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: The Puzzle of National Preference Formation and the Study of the Euro Crisis |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919864902
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(4) 491 –506
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929919864902
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Crises and Responsiveness:
Analysing German Preference
Formation During the
Eurozone Crisis
Hanno Degner and Dirk Leuffen
Abstract
Do crises increase governmental responsiveness to citizens’ policy demands in the European
Union? Building on the responsiveness literature, we challenge the claim that well-organized
business interests determine governmental preferences in times of crisis. We argue instead, that
vote-seeking governments rather account for citizens’ policy demands, given particularly high
levels of saliency and public attention prevalent during crises. To test our theory, we analyse
the formation of German governmental preferences on Economic and Monetary Union reforms
during the Eurozone Crisis. We use novel data from the ‘EMUChoices’ project, public opinion
polls as well as newspaper articles and trace the development of the German government’s
positioning on reforms such as the new Eurozone bailout fund or the tightening of fiscal
governance rules. Our analyses show that the German government, despite intensive lobbying
efforts by banks and industry associations, responded rather closely to the demands of the public.
On a normative ground, this finding highlights that input legitimacy in European Union decision-
making is stronger than oftentimes assumed, at least at the level of governmental preference
formation in times of crises.
Keywords
Eurozone crisis, responsiveness, Germany, EU, Economic and Monetary Union
Accepted: 1 July 2019
Introduction
Do crises increase governmental responsiveness to citizens’ policy demands in the
European Union (EU)? According to an orthodox reading of the liberal intergovernmen-
talist (LI) ‘baseline model’ of European integration (Moravcsik, 1993, 1998), public opin-
ion on EU policies only plays an ancillary role in the first stage of EU decision-making,
the formation of national preferences (cf. Hooghe and Marks, 2019; Schimmelfennig,
Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
Corresponding author:
Hanno Degner, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz,
Germany.
Email: hanno.degner@uni-konstanz.de
864902PSW0010.1177/1478929919864902Political Studies ReviewDegner and Leuffen
research-article2019
Special Issue Article
492 Political Studies Review 18(4)
2018). Instead, LI and standard political economy literature (Grossman and Helpman,
1994) expect governments to aggregate the interests of well-organized domestic eco-
nomic interest groups before heading to the supranational negotiation table. We here ask
whether an unfolding crisis changes this picture? Do European governments become
more responsive to citizen’s policy demands when facing an urgent threat, combined with
urgency and uncertainty?
To answer this question, we present two theoretical scenarios. The first one combines
a conventional reading of LI with findings on crisis decision-making (Boin et al., 2005;
Kingdon, 1984) and suggests that governments remain primarily responsive to economic
interest groups. Crisis-induced urgency may in fact even reinforce the bias of govern-
ments’ positions towards the (generally well-prepared and pre-existing) policy proposals
of commercial actors. In the second scenario, we argue that under crisis conditions gov-
ernments become more responsive to public opinion. To make this argument, we link LI
expectations on national preference formation to insights from the responsiveness litera-
ture, which analyses why and to what extent governments or other political actors respond
to (changes in) public demands. It also lays out core mechanisms, notably electoral turno-
ver and rational anticipation, to account for this link (Mansbridge, 2003; Miller and
Stokes, 1963; Soroka and Wlezien, 2010; Stimson et al., 1995; Wlezien, 1995). A number
of contributions already applied such mechanisms to the EU, albeit with a predominant
focus on the interstate bargaining stage of EU decision-making in the Council of Ministers
(Arregui and Creighton, 2018; Hagemann et al., 2017; Wratil, 2017, 2019) and with
respect to the European Parliament (Dür et al., 2015; Mahoney, 2007).
National preference formation so far has not received a lot of attention from a
responsiveness perspective (cf. Judge and Thomson, 2019: 691). This is somewhat
surprising, given the importance attributed to this step both in integration theory and
in the normative literature, as for instance, highlighted by Bellamy’s (2019: 10)
‘republican intergovernmentalism’. Moreover, in light of the debate on the EU’s dem-
ocratic deficit (Føllesdal and Hix, 2006; Majone, 1998; Moravcsik, 2002), fuelled in
recent years by critiques of executive-driven crisis management (Kreuder-Sonnen,
2016; Puntscher Riekmann and Wydra, 2013; Scharpf, 2014; Weiler, 2012), we consider
this an important research gap.
We test our theory on governmental responsiveness in times of crisis with a process-
tracing analysis of national preference formation during the Eurozone Crisis. We select
the case of Germany, the EU member state that arguably played a key role in EU decision-
making during the crisis (Bulmer, 2014; Schimmelfennig, 2015). In particular, we ana-
lyse the German government’s position taking on core reforms of the European Economic
and Monetary Union (EMU), namely the institutionalization of a fiscal emergency mech-
anism for the Eurozone and the tightening of the EU’s economic and fiscal governance
rules between 2010 and 2015, capturing the two poles of the redistribution-austerity
dimension which structured the EU reforms during the Eurozone crisis (cf. Lehner and
Wasserfallen, 2019). In our process tracing, we use different qualitative and quantitative
sources, including the ‘EMU Positions’ dataset (Wasserfallen et al., 2019), official gov-
ernmental and parliamentary documents, opinion polls like the Politbarometer and the
Eurobarometer, as well as quality newspaper articles.
Our analysis highlights that the German government indeed took public policy
demands and – related to this – the position of the parliamentary majority carefully into
account when formulating its positions on different reform proposals during the Eurozone
crisis. In contrast, despite heavy lobbying efforts, economic interest and financial market
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