Public Responsibility Attribution in the European Union

要使民主政体具有合法性，就必须让对某些政策负有责任的政治行为者承担公共责任。让决策者承担责任的前提是，政策的责任可以归于特定和可识别的政治行为者。虽然即使在民主国家，任何特定政策的责任归属也很难直截了当，但我们对公众如何为欧洲联盟（欧盟）采取的政策承担责任知之甚少。在某些情况下（如欧盟未能制定有效的边境控制制度），公众将责任主要归咎于欧盟机构;在其他情况下（如欧盟成员国之间未能重新分配难民），公众将责任主要归咎于欧盟成员国。在其他情况下（如欧盟自由流动原则促成的所谓福利移民），公共责任归属或多或少仍然没有针对性。特别是当政策的有效性受到质疑时，政治责任的公共归属就成为一个紧迫的问题：欧洲公众将政治责任归于谁？什么时候责任主要归于成员国一级的行为者，什么时候责任主要针对欧盟一级的行为者，什么时候责任没有针对性？通过回答这些问题，该项目旨在提高我们对欧盟制定的政策的公共责任归因（PRA）的理解。为此，我们将通过媒体内容分析的方法分析PRA在欧洲质量新闻中对三组不同欧盟政策的报道：（1）环境政策，（2）金融政策，以及（3）移民政策。为了解释不同情况下的PRA的变化，我们建议（作为一个理论出发点），欧盟的决策结构以及欧盟政策实施的结构如何塑造公众属性的责任，欧盟的政策。

For democratic polities to command legitimacy, it is essential that the political actors responsible for certain policies can be held publicly accountable. Holding policy-makers accountable presupposes that responsibility for policies can be attributed to particular and identifiable political actors. While even in democratic states the attribution of responsibility for any given policy is hardly ever straightforward, we know relatively little on how the public attributes responsibility for the policies adopted by the European Union (EU). In some cases (such as the failure of the EU to devise an effective border control regime) the public attributes responsibility predominantly to EU institutions; in other cases (such as the failed redistribution of refugees among EU members) the public attributes responsibility mainly to EU member states. And in still other cases (such as the so-called welfare-migration facilitated by the EU principle of freedom of movement) public responsibility attributions remain more or less untargeted. Especially when the effectiveness of policies is in question, the public attribution of political responsibility becomes a pressing issue: To whom does the European public attribute political responsibility? When is responsibility predominantly attributed to actors at the member state level, when are attributions primarily targeted at actors at the EU level, and when are attributions untargeted? By answering these questions, the project aims at improving our understanding of public responsibility attributions (PRAs) for policies enacted by the EU. To this end, we will analyze PRAs by means of media content analysis of the coverage of three different sets of EU policies in the European quality press: (1) environmental policies, (2) financial policies, as well as (3) migration policies. To explain variation in PRAs across cases we suggest (as a theoretical point of departure) that the structure of EU policy-making as well as the structure of EU policy implementation shape how the public attributes responsibility for EU policies.