Output Legitimacy? EU Policy Accountability, Congruence and EU Support.

The narrative on which EU legitimacy has been built mainly based on its capacity to deliver. Output legitimacy is thought as the main driver for support of European integration. This paper aims at providing a test of what largely remains an assumption. More precisely, we test the extent to which judgments about performance of EU policies and congruence is correlated with support to the EU. Empirical indicators come from a comparative survey conducted after the European elections of 2014 in 7 countries (Austria, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) including batteries of questions about judgments over policies (for salience, performance, and responsibility) and support to the EU. The survey has been conducted on Internet, is based on quota sampling, and gathers a total of 22000 interviews. We model this relation after controlling for other known factors determining attitudes towards the EU.