The Effect of International Endorsements on Different Crisis Response Policies

During economic crises, does foreign or supranational endorsement for economic adjustment policies affect domestic support for the implementation of such policies? If so, how does this support vary regarding both institutional endorsers and different policy components or policy categories? The ongoing Eurozone crisis demonstrates the importance of these questions, as citizens in hard-hit states are beginning to question whether their governments should implement austerity and labor market reforms that are “demands” of the European Union (EU) and related institutions and governments, in exchange for staying in the Eurozone in the long term. In this study we investigate whether making salient to citizens the fact that different external actors support such adjustment policies affects domestic acceptance of such policies. To do so, we fielded survey of a large nationally representative sample of citizens in Spain in September 2015, and asked about their support of fiscal austerity, labor market deregulation, and bank bailouts as responses to the economic crisis. We embedded in the survey experimental treatments that randomized which aspect of the policy was made salient, and, crucially, whether that policy was supported by the European Union, other European governments, and the German government. Our data will allow us to test whether endorsement effects from different outside actors matter. Further, we also use a variety of new measures on economic crisis exposure to test whether those measures have a greater or smaller effect than endorsements on these policy preferences.