Legitimacy and trust as victims of institutionalized austerity - A statistical analysis of persistent effects of austerity on trust in and support for the EU

Abstract

The crisis in the Eurozone area and the rest of the EU has in many ways been a seismic shift in both the economic and political framework of the Eurozone area. We know quite a bit about the political short-term effects of both austerity and crisis, because of extensive research into the political consequences of the Great Recession and the earliest phases of the sovereign debt crisis, but little has yet been done to investigate the long-term effects of the crisis on the legitimacy of the EU in those countries with austerity policies. It is this gap in the extant literature that this literature primarily seeks to fill. While I also go a long way towards confirming earlier findings of a significantly larger decline in trust and support in the austerity countries, my main contribution is to show that for both institutional trust and satisfaction with democracy this trust gap seems to be a new normal. Whether this is caused by austerity itself, or rather the effects of unemployment being worse in these countries, is something that still remains to be examined. These findings have broader implications, because they point to something that may be a problem for the EU in the longer term: The danger of this trust gap becoming a legitimacy gap. If there is a belief among large parts of the populaces of some member states that the union does not work for them, this may give rise to populist movements that in turn would undermine the institutional framework that makes up the European Union. In this way, imposing austerity policies that were meant to promote European growth in the longer term could lead to a political weakening of the European order.