Perceptions of Power:Voter Attribution of Responsibility within the European Union
Dr Sara Hobolt

Principal Investigator: Dr Sara Hobolt

Research Project Summary

This aim of this ESRC-funded project is to examine voters’ perceptions of governmental responsibility in the context of European Parliament elections. Perceptions of responsibility are as important for electoral dynamics as actual power structures. A key function of elections is that they allow citizens to cast judgement on politicians by evaluating their past performance, but this raises the question of who is to be blamed or credited for particular policy outcomes. This issue of where power lies is particularly pertinent in the multi-level system of governance in the European Union, where the lines of responsibility are ambiguous.

To examine both the causes and consequences of citizens’ perceptions of power, this project conducts a survey on how voters attribute responsibility across national and European institutions. This survey will form part of a post-election study of the 2009 European Parliament elections in 27 EU member states, conducted under the auspices of the European Election Studies (EES) and the PIREDEU project. We will integrate these survey data with a media study analysing the media coverage in the election campaigns leading up to the election. This allows us to examine how the media and the strategies of national politicians influence perceptions of responsibility.

This project is the first study of attribution of responsibility in the context of elections in a multi-level system of governance. Moreover, since the survey will be fielded simultaneously in 27 countries, this provides a unique comparative study of perceptions of power, and allows us to examine how characteristics of countries influence how voters allocate responsibility for different policy areas to different levels of government, EU or national, and how these allocations influence vote choices. By combining survey data with data on media, candidates and parties, this project provides a study of how the political and media context influences citizens’ perceptions of power and how this affects political behaviour.

The project started on 1 November 2008 and ends on 31 December 2010.

Project Participants:

Dr Sara Hobolt (Principal Investigator), University Lecturer in Comparative European Politics & Fellow of Lincoln College, University of Oxford
Professor Susan Banducci , Associate Professor in Political Science and Head of Department, University of Exeter
Professor Cees van der Eijk, Professor of Social Science Research Methods; Director, Methods and Data Institute, University of Nottingham
Dr James Tilley, University Lecturer in Quantitative Social Science & Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford

External Project Advisors:

Professor Wouter van der Brug, Chair of Political Science, University of Amsterdam
Professor Geoffrey Evans, Professor in the Sociology of Politics, Director of the Centre for Research Methods in the Social Sciences, Official Fellow, Nuffield College
Professor Mark Franklin, Stein Rokkan Professor of Comparative Politics at the European University Institute, Florence
Professor Michael Marsh, Professor of Comparative Political Behaviour and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

Project Funding and Project Partner:

This project is funded by the Economic Social and Research Council (ESRC).