ABSTRACT

Blaming is an important mechanism, affecting support for any political system. It is even more important for the EU, a unique supranational entity whose legitimacy has been considered by many scholars to rest primarily on its policy outcomes. Given the institutional limits to political participation by the people in the EU governance system, EU legitimacy would mainly rest on the effectiveness of policy outcomes for the people (output democracy). In this perspective, we focus on functional performance assessment and blaming the EU with the aim of connecting the concepts of output effectiveness and EU legitimacy. For this purpose, we address the question of when different political actors (citizens and elites), with different roles and resources, assign responsibility to the EU for policy outcome. Through use of fresh data collected by the EUENGAGE project, we show that the EU receives a great deal of citizens’ blame and, albeit to a lesser extent, elites also participate in blame games involving the EU. Our findings confirm widespread recognition of the EU as a fundamental policymaker. At the same time, they show that the levels reached by blaming, especially among the public, appear problematic for EU legitimacy, as where the EU receives a lot of the blame for policy output and poor performance trust in the EU and support for the integration may also decline.