Yellow Cards and Orange Cards: Does Euroskepticism Affect the Usage of the Early Warning System?

Do negative public attitudes concerning the European Union affect the issuance of opinions by EU member state parliaments within the “Early Warning System?”  With the implementation of the “Early Warning System” in the Lisbon Treaty, member state governments have been given a greater degree of input into the policy-making of the European Union.  This institutional change was designed to increase democratic governance in the EU.  In this paper, it is posited that when euroskepticism in a member state is greater, member state parliaments will more frequently contend within the “Early Warning System” that EU legislative acts violate the subsidiarity principle.  This expectation is tested using both OLS regression and negative binomial regression, with multi-state data derived from the European Commission as well as longitudinal data from the Eurobarometer Survey Series. This study has important implications for the study of European policy-making as well as for our understanding of political responsiveness to public opinion, and democratic governance in the EU.