The EU's Information Deficit: Comparing Political Knowledge across Levels of Governance

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, several scholars have argued that the legitimacy of the European Union (EU) suffers from an alarming level of public apathy toward EU affairs. Such critiques often assume that the public is largely ignorant about EU politics. However, we have yet to empirically determine the extent to which Europeans understand the EU or to identify the conditions that lead the public to become better informed about European politics. Given the higher salience of national issues and the greater media attention devoted to national politics, I theorize that most individuals indeed know more about their national government than the EU. Using data from Eurobarometer 61.0 and the 2009 European Election Study, I find individuals indeed perform worse on knowledge batteries at the European level. To better explain the public's understanding of EU affairs, I then model a number of micro- and macro-level predictors of knowledge and find that some of the usual suspects (such as education and the media) influence EU knowledge. Implications are drawn for the study of political behaviour in multilevel political systems.