Macro Salience: How Economic and Political Contexts Mediate Popular Evaluations of the Democracy Deficit in the European Union

Abstract

Under what conditions do European publics use economic versus political criteria when evaluating the democratic capacity of the European Union (EU)? Previous analyses of context effects do not explain how citizens evaluate conflicting information arising from national contexts. We argue that a nation’s affluence and governance quality establish the salience of issues and thereby influences the criteria that citizens use when evaluating an attitude object. When applied to the EU, the model predicts that citizens in less affluent nations evaluate the EU mainly on the basis of economic prospects. In more affluent nations, however, the model predicts that publics chiefly rely on political criteria to evaluate the EU’s democracy deficit. The results strongly support our argument, pointing to the changed character of the EU since 2004. Theoretically, the macro-salience model suggests ways in which the influence of conflicting national contexts on mass attitudes may be modeled.