In my capacity as a PhD Student in Political Science here at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I recently attended the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Conference in Chicago to present a paper as part of a panel on “European Governance: Perceptions and Preferences.” I wanted to briefly reflect on the panel as well as share a bit about my own research.
For this European Politics panel, I submitted a paper entitled “Perceptions of National Sovereignty Deficits in the European Union.” In this paper, I propose a new concept, the National Sovereignty Deficit (NSD), which I define as the individual-level perception that one’s country has less national sovereignty than would be ideal. This is particularly relevant in the context of such an organization as the European Union, where some sovereignty is relinquished by Member States so as to be pooled at the supranational level of the EU institutions. However, over the past twenty years, there has been an increase in sovereignty contestations and conflict over national sovereignty concerns in the EU (Brack et al. 2021). The most salient example of this is Brexit, in which the language of “national sovereignty” was readily employed (Brack et al. 2021; Venizelos 2016). In the paper, I argue that analyzing individual-level perceptions of sovereignty helps us better understand the dimension of “sovereignism” (Mueller and Heidelberger 2020) that influences individual attitudes towards the European Union.
I theorize that a series of crises (sovereign debt crisis, immigration crisis, Brexit, etc.,) have undermined confidence in the EU to act as a crisis-manager, throwing their legitimacy into question and invigorating concerns about national sovereignty. Drawing on what we know in the literature, I lay out a series of hypotheses as to what sort of individuals are more likely to perceive a deficit in national sovereignty. I use the European Social Survey Round 10 (2020) to analyze both individual-level attitudes and aggregated national trends. In line with extant literature and my proposed hypotheses, the results of my analysis (OLS multivariate regression) indicate that individuals who are further right-wing in their ideology, are populist, have strong anti-immigrant sentiment, and are from a country with a post-communist legacy are more likely to perceive greater deficits in their national sovereignty. In contrast, individuals who are more left-leaning, have greater trust in national and European parliaments, and are more open to migrants are less likely to perceive greater deficits in national sovereignty. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of this finding, namely that such a measure enables us to better capture trends in sovereigntist attitudes which can help us better understand forces of European disintegration.
The investigation into individual-level preferences towards the EU was complemented by the three other papers on the panel, which collectively had interesting overlap. Ezgi Siir Kibris (Rochester Institute of Technology) presented a paper entitled “Are the European Court of Human Rights Judges Biased?” Franziska Maier (University of Stuttgart) presented a paper entitled “Governing the World: What type of Global Democracy do Citizens Want?” Hyeonho Hahm (Standford University) presented a paper entitled “When to Delegate? How Valence and Positional Issues Shape Public Support for EU Delegation.” Taken holistically, the papers of this panel emphasize the importance of the individual-level perceptions and attitudes towards supranational governance, bridging the gap from the lowest unit of analysis to the highest.
Works Cited
Brack, N., Coman, R., & Crespy, A. (Eds.). (2021). Understanding Conflicts of Sovereignty in the EU.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Venizelos, E. (2016). Statehood and Sovereignty: The Difficult Equilibrium between European Union
and Member States in Crisis Management - Refugee Crisis and Brexit. European Politeia, 1, 17–
39.
Mueller, S., Heidelberger, A. (2020) Should we stay or should we join? 30 years of Sovereignism and
direct democracy in Switzerland, European Politics and Society, 21:2, 182-201.
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