Policy responsibility in the multilevel EU structure–The (non-)effect of media reporting on citizens’ responsibility attribution across four policy areas

Abstract

In the EU multilevel structure, citizens differ in perceptions of who is responsible for policies and their outcomes. Policy responsibility consists of two concepts, functional and causal responsibility. While the latter has been studied in the context of ‘blaming Europe’ for negative outcomes, the necessary condition of functional responsibility has received only scant attention. The media plays a crucial role in providing citizens with information for attributing causal responsibility, but may be even more important for attributing functional responsibility. We test this for the case of the Netherlands for four policy areas: Immigration, social welfare, economy, and terrorism. Linking survey data to automated media content data, we predict the effect of exposure to policy-related information on the European level on policy-level attribution. Although the results show both differences in citizens’ functional responsibility attributions and EU-related media coverage across policy areas, we find no effect from media consumption on responsibility attributions.