Christopher Wratil

Publications

2020Peer-reviewed journal article
Hobolt, S. and Wratil, C.
Contestation and Responsiveness in EU Council Deliberations
Journal of European Public Policy, 27:3, pp. 362-381
Abstract
Decision-making in the Council of the European Union appears highly consensual at the voting stage. However, we focus on Council deliberations, where we find higher levels of contestation. What drives government opposition in the Council? Using a novel approach of studying the Council through video footage of its public deliberations (DICEU – Debates in the Council of the European Union), we demonstrate that contestation between governments is, at least in part, driven by their responsiveness to domestic public opinion. Analysing deliberations on legislative packages in the Economic and Financial Affairs Council between 2010 and 2015, we show that governments are responsive to public opinion when setting out their policy positions, but primarily when the policy issues are salient domestically. Our study thus contributes to our understanding of government responsiveness in the EU.
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2019Peer-reviewed journal article
Wratil, C. and Hobolt, S.
Public Deliberations in the Council of the European Union: Introducing and Validating the DICEU Approach
European Union Politics, 20:3, pp. 511-533
Abstract
The Council of the European Union is the EU’s most powerful legislative body. Yet, we still have limited information about Council politics because of the lack of suitable data. This paper validates a new approach to studying Council politics entitled DICEU – Debates in the Council of the European Union. This approach is the first to leverage the public videos of Council deliberations as a data source. We demonstrate the face, convergent, and predictive validity of DICEU data. Governments’ ideal points scaled from these videos yield meaningful and well-known conflict dimensions. Moreover, governments’ positions during Council negotiations correlate highly with expert assessments and predict subsequent votes on legislative acts. We conclude that DICEU data provides a promising new approach to studying Council politics and multilevel governance.
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2019Peer-reviewed journal article
Franchino, F. and Wratil, C.
Representing the Compromise: How Institutions Serve Government Support Coalitions in European Union Policy-Making
European Journal of Political Research, 58:4, pp. 1129-1151
Abstract
This article presents an original model of policy making by multiparty coalitions at the international level. Specifically, it analyses how domestic institutions serve parties in enforcing policy compromises onto national ministers negotiating legislation in the European Union (EU). In contrast to existing research on coalition politics, the model accounts for the benefits of not only legislative but also executive institutions and incorporates opposition parties as pivotal actors under minority governments. Ministers propose policy positions at the EU level that represent domestic coalition compromises when cabinet participation, executive coordination and parliamentary oversight of EU affairs make it cheap for coalition partners to challenge the minister’s position and when ideological divisiveness increases the incentive to do so. Statistical analyses of 1,694 policy positions taken by ministers from 22 member states in the Council of the EU provide strong empirical evidence for the model. The results support the claim of executive dominance in EU policy making but also highlight that, where institutions are strong, ministers represent domestic coalition compromises rather than their own positions.
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2019Peer-reviewed journal article
Proksch, S.-O., Wratil, C. & Wäckerle, J.
Testing the Validity of Automatic Speech Recognition for Political Text Analysis
Political Analysis, 27:3, pp. 339-359
Abstract
The analysis of political texts from parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, social media, or press releases forms the basis of major and growing fields in political science, not least since advances in “text-as-data” methods have rendered the analysis of large text corpora straightforward. However, a lot of sources of political speech are not regularly transcribed, and their on-demand transcription by humans is prohibitively expensive for research purposes. This class includes political speech in certain legislatures, during political party conferences as well as television interviews and talk shows. We showcase how scholars can use automatic speech recognition systems to analyze such speech with quantitative text analysis models of the “bag-of-words” variety. To probe results for robustness to transcription error, we present an original “word error rate simulation” (WERSIM) procedure implemented in R. We demonstrate the potential of automatic speech recognition to address open questions in political science with two substantive applications and discuss its limitations and practical challenges.
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2019Peer-reviewed journal article
Wratil, C.
Territorial Representation and the Opinion-Policy Linkage: Evidence from the European Union
American Journal of Political Science, 63:1, pp. 197-211
Abstract
A key feature of federal systems is the representation of sub-national units by “territorial representatives” in policy-making at the federal level. How do such arrangements influence the linkage between public opinion and policy outputs? I argue that policy-making under territorial representation should be systematically skewed towards opinion in those states where citizens care about a policy issue and have a uniform view on it. This claim is tested using a novel dataset of policy change in the European Union, covering 211 policy issues and 6,506 observations of opinion-policy dyads. Results show that measures weighting opinion across member states by how much national citizens care about an issue are better predictors of policy change than EU-wide mean opinion. Moreover, congruence between state-level opinion and EU-level policy becomes more likely, the more salient and clear-cut opinion in a member state. These findings refine our understanding of the opinion-policy linkage under territorial representation.
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2018Peer-reviewed journal article
Wratil, C.
Modes of Government Responsiveness in the European Union: Evidence from Council Negotiation Positions
European Union Politics, 19:1, p. 52-74
Abstract
Are national governments responsive to citizens' opinions when negotiating policies in the Council of the European Union? Conceiving of the Council's policy-making space as encompassing left-right and pro-anti integration issues, I argue that governments apply different 'modes of responsiveness' on these issues. As left-right issues are more reliably and intensely salient in domestic elections than pro-anti integration issues, governments' responsiveness to left-right public opinion should be more systematic than to pro-anti integration opinion. Statistical analyses of 3700 policy positions of governments in the Council demonstrate that governments highly structure their responsiveness on left-right issues according to electoral cycles and systems ('systematic mode'). However, they only sporadically respond to public opinion on pro-anti integration issues, when parties and events trigger the public salience of integration ('sporadic mode').
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2018Peer-reviewed journal article
Wratil, C. and Pastorella, G.
Dodging the Bullet: How Crises Trigger Technocrat-Led Governments
European Journal of Political Research, 57:2, p. 450-72
Abstract
Governments led by nonpartisan, ‘technocratic’ prime ministers are a rare phenomenon in parliamentary democracies, but have become more frequent since the late 1980s. This article focuses on the factors that lead to the formation of such cabinets. It posits that parliamentary parties with the chance to win the prime ministerial post will only relinquish it during political and economic crises that drastically increase the electoral costs of ruling and limit policy returns from governing. Statistical analyses of 469 government formations in 29 European democracies between 1977 and 2013 suggest that political scandals and economic recessions are major drivers of the occurrence of technocratic prime ministers. Meanwhile, neither presidential powers nor party system fragmentation and polarisation have any independent effect. The findings suggest that parties strategically choose technocrat-led governments to shift blame and re-establish their credibility and that of their policies in the face of crises that de-legitimise their rule.
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2017Peer-reviewed journal article
Hagemann, S., Hobolt, S. B. & Wratil, C.
Government Responsiveness in the European Union: Evidence From Council Voting
Comparative Political Studies, 50:6, p. 850-76
Abstract
Are governments responsive to public preferences when legislating in international organizations? This article demonstrates that governments respond to domestic public opinion even when acting at the international level. Specifically, we examine conflict in the European Union's primary legislative body, the Council of the European Union (EU). We argue that domestic electoral incentives compel governments to react to public opinion. Analyzing a unique data set on all legislative decisions adopted in the Council since 1999, we show that governments are more likely to oppose legislative proposals that extend the level and scope of EU authority when their domestic electorates are skeptical about the EU. We also find that governments are more responsive when the issue of European integration is salient in domestic party politics. Our findings demonstrate that governments can use the international stage to signal their responsiveness to public concerns and that such signals resonate in the domestic political debate.
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2017Other
Vehrkamp, R. and Wratil, C.
A Populist Moment? Populist Attitudes of Voters and Non-Voters before the German Federal Election 2017
Bertelsmann Foundation: Gütersloh
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2015Peer-reviewed journal article
Hobolt, S. B. and Wratil, C.
Public Opinion and the Crisis: The Dynamics of Support for the Euro
Journal of European Public Policy, 22:2, p. 238–56
Abstract
Further integration in the European Union (EU) increasingly depends on public legitimacy. The global financial crisis and the subsequent euro area crisis have amplified both the salience and the redistributive consequences of decisions taken in Brussels, raising the question of how this has influenced public support for European integration. In this contribution, we examine how public opinion has responded to the crisis, focusing on support for monetary integration. Interestingly, our results show that support for the euro has remained high within the euro area; however, attitudes are increasingly driven by utilitarian considerations, whereas identity concerns have become less important. While the crisis has been seen to deepen divisions within Europe, our findings suggest that it has also encouraged citizens in the euro area to form opinions on the euro on the basis of a cost–benefit analysis of European economic governance, rather than relying primarily on national attachments.
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2013Other
Petersen, T., Hierlemann, D., Vehrkamp, R. & Wratil, C.
Divided Democracy – Political Participation and Satisfaction with Democracy before the German Federal Elections 2013
Bertelsmann Foundation: Gütersloh [TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN]
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