Democratic Accountability in American and European Single Market Governance

• In Event: Comparative Federalism of Single Markets in the US and the EU

Abstract

Where do see more accountability to citizens in the governance of “single markets,” the U.S. or the EU? These two vast polities espouse similar aspirations to balance internal-market openness with subunit policy diversity, posing many questions about who gets to choose their own policies on what. We might expect weak accountability in general on the technical, low-salience terrain of interstate regulation—-as EU architect Jacques Delors said, “You cannot fall in love with the Single Market”—-but there seem to be good reasons to expect more such accountability in the U.S. than in the EU. Not only does the U.S. display higher interstate flows of trade and mobility, which should make interstate impediments more salient for Americans, but the U.S. features broadly favorable conditions for accountability that the EU lacks: highly competitive electoral politics for central government, shared language and identity and media, and strong central resources to distribute. Following Amy Lehrman and Samuel Trachtman’s theorization of accountability in terms of citizen awareness, assessment, and attribution, we test this broad hypothesis in an original survey about single-market issues, fielded in June 2023 with representative samples of 4,000 Americans and 16,000 residents of eight EU countries. The striking results disconfirm the hypothesis across the board. Relative to Americans, and even when controlling for a host of other conditions, Europeans are considerably more aware of their internal-market governance, assess it more positively, and more clearly attribute credit for it to the EU. This is especially true for respondents in economic positions related to cross-border business: Europeans who work in cross-border business are especially likely to assess internal-market openness positively, whereas Americans working in interstate business are slightly less likely than the average resident to do so. It also holds for subgroups we might expect to be skeptical of market openness and EU/federal authority. We explain this contrast in institutional and ideational terms. The EU institutions have worked for seven decades to draw attention to single-market issues, whereas no American federal agency has a similar task. Americans today also display a remarkably widespread distrust of central authority that has little parallel in continental Europe.

Authors

• Nicholas F. Jacobs, Colby College

• Craig A. Parsons, University of Oregon