Blaming Europe?: Responsibility Without Accountability in the European Union

A key component of democratic accountability is that citizens understand 'who is to blame'. Nonetheless, little is known about how citizens attribute responsibility in the European Union or how those perceptions of responsibility matter. This book presents the first comprehensive account of how citizens assign blame to the EU, how politicians and the media attempt to shift blame and finally, how it matters for electoral democracy. Based on rich and unique data sources, Blaming Europe? sheds light on all three aspects of responsibility in the EU. First, it shows that while institutional differences between countries shape citizen judgements of EU responsibility, those judgements are also highly determined by pre-existing attitudes towards the EU. Second, it demonstrates that neither politicians nor the media assign much blame to the EU. Third, it establishes that regardless of whether voters are capable of accurately assigning responsibility, they are not able to hold their EU representatives to account via the ballot box in European elections due to the lack of an identifiable 'European government' to reward or punish. As a consequence, when citizens hold the EU responsible for poor performance, but are unable to sanction an EU incumbent, they lose trust in the EU as a whole instead. In conclusion, it argues that this 'accountability deficit' has significant implications for the future of the European Union.

Table of Contents:
Part One: Blaming the European Union? 1: Blaming Europe? 2: Who is responsible? Part two: Citizens and Blame 3: When do citizens get it right? 4: When do citizens get it wrong? Part Three: The Media, Politicians, and Blame 5: Who do the media blame? 6: Who do the media inform? 7: Who do politicians blame? Part Four: The Consequences of Blame 8: Does responsibility matter? 9: Conclusion: Responsibility without accountability Appendix Bibliography

About the Author :
Sara Hobolt is Sutherland Chair in European Institutions at the European Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, she has held posts at the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan. She has published extensively on European Union politics, public opinion, and elections. Her book Europe in Question: Referendums on European Integration (Oxford University Press, 2009) was awarded the Best Book prize by the European Union Studies Association in 2010. James Tilley is a university lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and Trinity College Dublin. His research is mainly in the fields of public opinion and electoral behaviour, and he has published widely on topics including European Parliament elections, support for the EU, the attribution of responsibility, and the social bases of voting behaviour.

Review :
Blaming Europe is an important and timely work that is likely toset the agenda for academic analysis of EP elections. It will also beof value to those interested in attributions of responsibility more generally: the combination of the institutionalist clarity of responsibility' paradigm with work on psychological biases in responsibility attributions is an innovative and significant contribution to the broader literature. This subtle, careful and clever book sets out to clarify a mystery - the mystery of how accountability for public policy is bestowed on public actors and institutions in the European Union... Because the problems are so carefully laid out, the solutions are quite subtle and deserve widespread consideration. This fine book should be widely read by those who are concerned about the quality of governance in the European Union and its member states. The relationship between the EU and the citizens of Europe is troubled. Like in a crime story, a major question is who to blame, i.e. who's done it? In their book Hobolt and Tilley provide a compelling and comprehensive analysis of this intricate question. The result is a theoretically rich, empirically impressive, state of the art comparative analysis which is pushing our thinking in this field a big step forward. This is modern political science at its very best: addressing an important and topical question (the legitimacy crisis in the EU), and answering the question with a clear theory and careful data analysis. This should be essential reading for researchers and students of democratic politics in Europe as well as of public opinion towards globalisation. Also, the finding that citizens can allocate responsibility in Europes multi-level polity correctly if they have good quality information has important implications for policymakers, politicians, journalists and opinion formers. Does multilevel governance blur political responsibility? In Blaming Europe? Responsibility without accountability in the European Union, Sara Hobolt and James Tilley argue that citizens form judgments on the basis of information and bias. If information is poor, citizens fall back on prior EU views which color perceptions. Using a wealth of evidence they demonstrate how policy-specific information is scarce in the EU, and this deprives Europe of a transparently responsible government. The upshot is a paradox: ambiguity protects the EU from getting punished at the ballot box, but exposes it to eroding trust in EU institutions. This is a truly brilliant book that gets to the heart of EU politics in clear and compelling language and opens up new lines of inquiry concerning political responsibility in multilevel systems.