Taking public opinion to Brussels

When policy makers respond to public opinion within the policy making process, this is called policy responsiveness, or responsiveness of the government. On the national level, evidence for policy responsiveness is often found. More recently scholars are researching whether policy responsiveness also occurs when the policy making process is one level higher, in the European Union. This thesis researches policy responsiveness for one specific body of the European Union, the Council of Ministers. In theory, there are two main arguments why there should or should not be policy responsiveness in the Council. Some researchers argue there should be, because the ministers represented in the Council want to be re-elected in their own country. This leads to incentives to respond to public opinion. Other scholars argue that the distance to Brussels is too big, citizens know little about European Union policies and also do not care as much enough to look up information themselves. This leads to less enticement for policy makers to respond to public opinion. Results on earlier research mostly show evidence in favour of policy responsiveness in the Council. This thesis builds upon the article by Wratil (2018), as this thesis uses his dataset and variables. Therefore, the issues based on which policy responsiveness is investigated are separated into two scales: left-right issues and issues on integration (pro-anti integration issues). Wratil (2018) argues that for the former scale a long term strategic plan is developed by the ministers in the Council to respond to public opinion. For the latter scale, integration issues, Wratil argues there is no long term strategic plan. Ministers only respond when they think their constituency regards the issue as important. The additional value of this thesis is to investigate the influence of three issue characteristics on policy responsiveness; (1) the type of issue; (2) the decision making procedure and (3) salience. The findings support Wratil’s (2018) theory for the left-right scale, as policy responsiveness is found consistently and there is no interaction effect of the different issue characteristics. For the pro-anti integration scale, two factors were found that cause the ministers in the Council to respond to public opinion: the type of issue and the decision making procedure. For both scales, there was no evidence for an influence of the salience of an issue on policy responsiveness.