Search

The recent referenda in France and the Netherlands have brought renewed attention to the question of whether European integration is an elite-led process or is driven bottom-up, through the demands of electorates for more or less integration. Past research has presented competing views of the politics of European integration. On one hand, Carrubba (2001) argues that party elites respond to their electorates and represent mass preferences over integration. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that party elites cue the mass public, shaping its preferences concerning Europe. When one accepts this view, the causal arrow runs from elites to masses, rather than from masses to elites, as Carrubba (2001) suggested. In this paper, we estimate models that allow for both directions of causality. Moreover, we understand the relationships between party elites and their electorates to be conditional, i.e. contingent on a series of attributes of the environment, the party, and the electorate. Using expert survey placements of parties and Eurobarometer data about electorates, we find little evidence that parties respond to electorates. We find much more systematic evidence that electorates takes cues from parties. However, the strength of this cueing effect is contingent on other factors, suggesting that cueing is not always effective. We consider the implications of our work for Euroskepticism and the alleged gap between citizens and political elites on European integration. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing literature on ambivalence has typically relied on theories about the survey response to understand ambivalence's effects. While valuable, we believe these theories fail to capture the motivational implications of ambivalence. In this paper, we propose and test a motivational theory of ambivalence. Drawing on extensive research in social and political psychology, we argue that ambivalent individuals are driven by accuracy goals while univalent individuals are driven by directional goals. One implication of this theory is that objective information should carry more weight for ambivalent than for univalent individuals. We test this implication by considering the impact of objective economic data on individuals with high versus low levels of ambivalence toward the Democratic and Republican parties. Consistent with our theory, we find that ambivalent individuals place greater weight on objective economic data when forming retrospective economic evaluations. We discuss the aggregate effect of this finding, as well as its normative implications. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]