Citizens' Exit from the EU, Back to the Nation-State? Resilience, Policy Feedback and Legitimacy in Times of Crisis

This paper deals with the restructuring of European states, mostly through European integration and regionalization, and its implications for each level of government’s legitimacy in the eyes of European citizens. The paper takes stock of the considerable efforts that have been devoted to analysing EU legitimacy and the nascent strand of research on regional governements’ legitimacy, but departs from the existing literature in two ways. First, it analyzes changes in legitimacy as a three-level game (Scharpf, 2012). Second, the paper relies on the policy feedback literature (Campbell, 2012; Mettler & Soss, 2004) to investigate the impact of European, national and regional policy making on each level of government’s legitimacy. Specifically, the paper addresses the following question: In the midst of the current crisis, in a time when European citizens are supposedly turning their back from the EU (Hooghe and Marks 2008, Boomgaarden, and al. 2011), are they returning to their nation-state, or are they exiting the national and the European level to the regional level? The paper hypothesizes that the visibility and the traceability of public policy (Pierson, 1993) are key to the explanation of their feedback effects on citizens’ preferences for the national, European and regional level respectively. Methodologically, the paper relies on comparative data on five European countries (France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Spain). The paper is based on the regional authority index (Hooghe, Marks, Schakel, 2010), the Europeanization index of domestic legislatures (Brouard, and al. 2012), as well as survey data (EVS, ESS and Eurobarometers).