Who's Cueing Whom? Assessing the Relationship between Electorate Opinion and Party Positions on the European Union.

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]