Trust spillovers among national and European institutions
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Author | Alberto Quintavalla,Goran Dominioni,Alessandro Romano |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116519897835 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Trust spillovers among
national and European
institutions
Goran Dominioni
Rotterdam Institute of Law and Economics, Erasmus
University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Alberto Quintavalla
Rotterdam Institute of Law and Economics, Erasmus
University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Alessandro Romano
Yale Law School, New Haven, CT, USA
Abstract
In this article, we study spillovers in political trust between the national parliaments of
15 Member States and the European Commission, the European Parliament and the
European Central Bank in the period 2000–2015. We show that in most instances
spillovers between the national parliaments and the European Commission and the
European Parliament are bidirectional, asymmetric, and change over time and place.
A corollary of these findings is that simultaneously achieving high level of trust in
institutions at different levels of governance may require a deeper understanding of
the complex inter-institutional relationships that exist in the EU multilevel governance
setting.
Keywords
Commission, European Parliament, institutional trust, trust spillovers
Corresponding author:
Alberto Quintavalla, Rotterdam Institute of Law and Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam,
Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, Rotterdam 3062 PA, The Netherlands.
Email: quintavalla@law.eur.nl
European Union Politics
2020, Vol. 21(2) 276–293
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116519897835
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Introduction
In the European Union (EU), supranational and subnational institutions comple-
ment the governance structure of national political systems (Hooghe and Marks,
2003; Marks and Hooghe, 2000). In this multilevel governance system, changes in
public trust in institutions at one level of governance influence public trust in
institutions at other levels. Therefore, many scholars have investigated how
changes in citizens’ attitudes towards institutions placed at one level spill onto
institutions at other levels (Anderson, 1998; Kritzinger, 2003; Sa
´nchez-Cuenca,
2000; Torcal and Christmann, 2018).
In this article, we contribute to this literature in two ways. First, we propose a
taxonomy of the possible kinds of interactions among institutions. We say that two
institutions are interacting when there are trust spillovers among them. We say that
the kind of interaction between two institutions is defined in terms of the direction
(i.e. unilateral or bilateral) and the sign (i.e. positive or negative) of the spillovers
between these institutions. This taxonomy reveals eight different types of possible
interactions. In contrast, the existing literature has focused almost exclusively on
only two of these interactions, in particular those described by congruence theory
(Anderson, 1998; Torcal and Christmann, 2018) and compensation theory
(Kritzinger, 2003; Sa
´nchez-Cuenca, 2000). In our taxonomy, we label these two
theories ‘unilateral congruence’ and ‘unilateral compensation’, respectively.
After having developed our taxonomy, we employ a model of differential
equations that allows us to determine which of the eight kinds of interactions
emerge among the national parliaments (NPs) of 15 Member States
1
and three
key European institutions: the European Commission (EC), the European
Parliament (EP) and the European Central Bank (ECB). This analysis shows
that in all countries there is a clear predominance of asymmetric interactions, a
kind of interaction that has been overlooked by the literature.
Asymmetric interactions present two features. First, the spillovers are bidirec-
tional. That is, changes in trust level in NPs affect trust in EU institutions and
changes in trust level in EU institutions affect trust in NPs. Second, an increase/
decrease in the trust in the national institution influences trust levels in EU insti-
tutions in one direction (e.g. positive), whereas an increase/decrease in the trust in
EU institutions influences trust in the NP in the opposite direction (e.g. negative).
For instance, our results show the existence of an asymmetric interaction between
the Danish NP and the EP after the year 2012. In this case, an increase in the trust
in the NP would generate a positive spillover onto the EP. Vice versa, an increase in
the trust in the EP would generate a negative spillover onto the NP. This result
entails that the two dominant theories of trust spillovers between national and EU
institutions, i.e. congruence theory and compensation theory, are an oversimplifi-
cation of reality.
In line with recent literature (Torcal and Christmann, 2018), our analysis con-
firms that the way in which institutions interact changes over time. These results
Dominioni et al. 277
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