Dominik Schraff

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Schraff

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Dominik

ORCID

0000-0003-3386-1352

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Publications 1 - 10 of 14

Asymmetric ratification standards and popular perceptions of legitimacy
Schraff, Dominik (2022)
Journal of European Public Policy
The ratification of EU agreements is characterized by the application of different democratic procedures across member states. Building on the demoi-cratic theory of legitimate global governance, I argue that citizens benchmark their national procedure against highly visible direct democratic ratification votes held in other member states. If citizens experience unequal influence on EU decision-making, the perceived legitimacy of the EU regime erodes. I test this argument with a research design that combines a population-based survey experiment and a quasi-experiment. First, a survey experiment in Germany reveals that information about asymmetric ratification standards decrease fairness perceptions and satisfaction with EU democracy. Second, a natural experiment around the 2005 French vote on the EU constitutional treaty shows that the referendum decreased satisfaction with EU democracy in states with pending and indirect ratification. These findings suggest that asymmetric access of citizens to EU decision-making can decrease popular support for EU governance.
Is the Member States' Curse the EU's Blessing? Inequality and EU Regime Evaluation
Schraff, Dominik (2020)
Journal of Common Market Studies
How does inequality shape regime evaluations in Europe's multi‐level governance system? I argue that rising inequality improves citizens' evaluation of the EU's political system. This effect is driven by two mechanisms. First, adverse social and political consequences of inequality within national democracies strongly erode national regime evaluations. This leads to an improvement of EU regime evaluations in relative terms. Second, citizens compensate negative national conditions by redirecting hopes to the supranational level. This compensation mechanisms further tilts regime evaluates in favour of the EU. An empirical analysis of change in national and European parliament trust across 27 member states and 14 years provides empirical support for this argument. It also shows that the two mechanisms coexist and that their relevance is conditioned by previous levels of regime support. (© 2020 University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd)
Light at the End of the Tunnel? Eurozone Bailouts and Satisfaction with Democracy
Schimmelfennig, Frank; Schraff, Dominik (2020)
The European Social Model under Pressure? Liber Amicorum in Honour of Klaus Armingeon
How did the Eurozone bailouts affect national democracies? Recent research, including by Klaus Armingeon and his colleagues, indicates strong citizen detachment from democracy due to the external constraints imposed by bailout programs on national autonomy. This chapter re-examines the detachment thesis with the help of the generalized synthetic control method. We confirm the strong negative effect of bailouts on satisfaction with democracy, but show that the effect diminishes substantially after a number of years.
Corruption and trust in the European Parliament: Quasi-experimental evidence from the Qatargate scandal
Hegewald, Sven; Schraff, Dominik (2024)
European Journal of Political Research
Citizens' ability to hold corrupt politicians accountable is a key feature of democratic political systems. Particularly in the European Union (EU), such accountability mechanisms are often argued to malfunction due to the EU's complicated and opaque institutional structure, which could compromise voters' basic abilities to detect political malpractice in Brussels. Putting EU voters' attentiveness to the test, we provide quasi-experimental evidence of the causal effect of a recent corruption scandal in the European Parliament. Leveraging an 'Unexpected Event during Survey Design' identification strategy in France and Germany, we document a sizeable negative effect of the so-called Qatargate scandal on public trust in the European Parliament. This provides causal evidence on the presence of attentiveness to EU politics within these electorates. Given the EU's complex institutional structure, we derive two alternative implications from this finding.
Regional inequality and institutional trust in Europe
Lipps, Jana; Schraff, Dominik (2021)
European Journal of Political Research
Inequality is a central explanation of political distrust in democracies, but has so far rarely been considered a cause of (dis-)trust towards supranational governance. Moreover, while political scientists have extensively engaged with income inequality, other salient forms of inequality, such as the regional wealth distribution, have been sidelined. These issues point to a more general shortcoming in the literature. Determinants of trust in national and European institutions are often theorized independently, even though empirical studies have demonstrated large interdependence in citizens’ evaluations of national and supranational governance levels. In this paper, we argue that inequality has two salient dimensions: (1) income inequality and (2) regional inequality. Both dimensions are important antecedent causes of European Union (EU) trust, the effects of which are mediated by evaluations of national institutions. On the micro-level, we suggest that inequality decreases a person's trust in national institutions and thereby diminishes the positive effect of national trust on EU trust. On the macro-level, inequality decreases country averages of trust in national institutions. This, however, informs an individual's trust in the EU positively, compensating for the seemingly untrustworthiness of national institutions. Finally, we propose that residing in an economically declining region can depress institutional trust. We find empirical support for our arguments by analysing regional temporal change over four waves of the European Social Survey 2010–2016 with a sample of 209 regions nested in 24 EU member states. We show that changes in a member state's regional inequality have similarly strong effects on trust as changes in the Gini coefficient of income inequality. Applying causal mediation techniques, we can show that the effects of inequality on EU trust are largely mediated through citizens’ evaluations of national institutions. In contrast, residing in an economically declining region directly depresses EU trust, with economically lagging areas turning their back on European governance and resorting to the national level instead. Our findings highlight the relevance of regional inequality for refining our understanding of citizens’ support for Europe's multi-level governance system and the advantages of causal modelling for the analysis of political preferences in a multi-level governance system. (© 2020 European Consortium for Political Research).
Political trust during the Covid‐19 pandemic: Rally around the flag or lockdown effects?
Schraff, Dominik (2021)
European Journal of Political Research
How can we explain the rise in diffuse political support during the Covid‐19 pandemic? Recent research has argued that the lockdown measures generated political support. In contrast, I argue that the intensity of the pandemic rallied people around political institutions. Collective angst in the face of exponentially rising Covid‐19 cases depresses the usual cognitive evaluations of institutions and leads citizens to rally around existing intuitions as a lifebuoy. Using a representative Dutch household survey conducted over March 2020, I compare the lockdown effect to the dynamic of the pandemic. I find that the lockdown effect is driven by pre‐existing time trends. Accounting for non‐linearities in time makes the lockdown effect disappear. In contrast, more flexible modelling techniques reveal a robust effect of Covid‐19 infections on political trust. In line with an anxiety effect, I find that standard determinants of political trust – such as economic evaluations and social trust – lose explanatory power as the pandemic spreads. This speaks to an emotionally driven rally effect that pushes cognitive evaluations to the background. © 2020 European Consortium for Political Research.
Who rallies around the flag? Evidence from panel data during the Covid-19 pandemic
Hegewald, Sven; Schraff, Dominik (2024)
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties
Recent studies on political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic diagnosed a rally-around-the-flag effect leading to exceptionally high levels of trust in politics. While this finding has been established over various country contexts, our understanding of the precise dynamics behind the rally effect remains limited. In this paper, we argue that socio-demographic characteristics, in particular age differences, as well as pre-existing trust levels moderate the extent of the rally effect. Using individual-level panel data from the Netherlands, covering the time before and during the first Covid-19 wave, we show that the rally effect is particularly pronounced among older individuals, while it is absent among the young. Furthermore, we find a catch-up effect among the more distrusting parts of the population, such as populist supporters and low-income earners, who seem to largely drive the rally effect during the initial stage of the pandemic. This shows that the extent of the rally effect is conditional on socio-demographic characteristics, pointing towards the role of group risks and pre-crisis trust differentials in shaping people's response to an existential threat.
Does differentiated integration strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the EU? Evidence from the 2015 Danish opt-out referendum
Schraff, Dominik; Schimmelfennig, Frank (2020)
European Union Politics
Differentiation has become a durable feature of European integration but we know little about its effects on citizens. Does differentiated integration improve the democratic quality of the European Union and strengthen citizens’ support – or does it promote political divides and foster citizens’ alienation from European integration? This article develops a theoretical argument on the positive attitudinal effects of differentiated integration, contending that differentiation accommodates heterogeneous preferences in a diverse EU and strengthens citizens’ ownership of European integration. A quasi-experimental analysis of public opinion of the 2015 Danish Justice and Home Affairs opt-out referendum demonstrates that the public vote increased citizens’ EU efficacy, indeed. Eurosceptic voters in particular strengthen their belief that their individual voice counts in EU politics, suggesting that differentiation can have a positive effect on the perceived democratic quality of the EU.
United or divided in diversity? The heterogeneous effects of ethnic diversity on European and national identities
Schraff, Dominik; Sczepanski, Ronja (2022)
European Union Politics
In this article, we argue that the size and cultural proximity of immigrant populations in people's residential surroundings shape national and European identities. This means that the type of migrant population activates cultural threat perceptions and opportunities for contact to varying degrees. Geocoded survey data from the Netherlands suggests that large non-Western immigrant shares are associated with more exclusive national identities, while mixed contexts with Western and non-Western populations show more inclusive identities. These results suggest that highly diverse areas with mixed immigrant populations hold a potential for more tolerance. In contrast, exclusive national identities become strongly pronounced under the presence of sizeable culturally distant immigrant groups.
Estimating subnational preferences across the European Union
Lipps, Jana; Schraff, Dominik (2021)
Political Science Research and Methods

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Dominik Schraff

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