No dia 22 de maio, o Grupo de Investigação SPARC convida Lea Heyne (ICS-ULisboa) e Rubén Ruiz-Rufino (King's College London) como oradores num seminário sobre o tema A Tale of Four Crises: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Relationship Between Economic Adjustments and Trust in the EU. A partir das 14h30, na Sala 2 do ICS-ULisboa e online (ID: 975 6636 2593, pass 124396) .

During the last decades, the European Union has engaged in various types of economic adjustment programmes to manage threats to its economic and political stability. How do citizens’ react to those crisis management strategies? This project uses quasi-experimental evidence based on Eurobarometer (EB) data to compare the consequences of different coordinated responses to economic shocks for EU legitimacy. We characterize crisis management strategies along two dimensions: first, the extent can vary between symmetric and asymmetric shocks, and second, the scope of the response can range from ordinary to extraordinary adjustments. Our analysis tests for the causal effects of four economic adjustments - the pre-2005 excessive deficit procedure (EDP), the post-2010 financial bailouts, the 2020 Covid Recovery Plan, and the European Central Bank (ECB) handling of the 2022/2023 supply-side shock. Using difference-in-difference (DiD) as well as unexpected event during survey designs (UESD), we model the relationship between the four crisis responses and citizens’ trust in the EU. Our results show that economic adjustments following symmetrical shocks tend to positively affect citizens trust in the EU, particularly when extraordinary instruments are used. However, EU responses to asymmetrical shocks negatively impact EU support amongst citizens in affected countries when the adjustments are extraordinary.

Lea Heyne is a political scientist and research fellow at ICS, with a PhD in Democracy Studies from the University of Zurich (2018). Her thesis was titled “Support for which kind of democracy? What European citizens want from their democracies, and why they are (dis)satisfied”. She also holds a BA in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Göttingen (2011), and an MA in International Affairs from Sciences Po Paris and the Free University Berlin (2013). She has previously worked as a research assistant at the Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB) and the NCCR Democracy project in Zurich and has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Irvine (California) and Mannheim (MZES). Her work focuses on political attitudes and behaviour, public opinion, survey methodology as well as democratic institutions and democratic quality. From 2019-2021, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the ICS in the ERC MAPLE project led by Marina Costa Lobo. Since 2021, she is an FCT funded research fellow. She is PI of the FCT project TINA, which explores the relationship between economic choice perceptions and democratic support, and coordinates the Social Science Research Methods Seminar (SSRMS) as well as the Post-Graduate Seminar in Comparative Politics at ICS. She is also president and co-founder of the association DemocracyNet.

Rubén Ruiz-Rufino is a reader in comparative politics in the Department of Political Economy. His research deals with measuring the functioning of political institutions, the effect of political representation in regime stability and the relationship between globalisation and political change. Rubén holds a PhD from the Juan March Institute and an MSc in Social and Political Theory from the University of Edinburgh. Before joining the department, he held several postdoctoral positions. Between 2007 and 2008, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence; from 2008 to 2011 he was a Juan de la Cierva Fellow at the Institute of Politics and Public Goods (IPP-CSIC) in Madrid, and from 2011 to 2013 he was a García Pelayo Fellow at the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies (CEPC) also in Madrid.