Congrès AFSP Aix 2015 1 National Governments’ Responsibility within a Multi-Level System of Governance: A Positive–Sum Game? Abel FRANÇOIS EM Strasbourg Business School - University of Strasbourg (LaRGE) abel.francois@unistra.fr Cal LE GALL University of Salzburg (SCEUS) cal.legall@sbg.ac.at Raul MAGNI BERTON Sciences Po Grenoble, Grenoble University (PACTE) raul.magniberton@iepg.fr Abstract EU competences have grown over the years, reducing national governments’ room for maneuver in many areas. Now, the EU has responsibilities over the state of the economy and partially replaces national governments’ traditional authority. If European citizens are aware of this situation, they should partly transfer their satisfaction or dissatisfaction from the national to the European level of governance when their country entersthe EU. This articletests whether citizens’ support towards the EU is more dependent on the state of the economy after EU accession and whether citizens’ support towards national governments is impacted by EU accession. Based on Eurobarometer surveys which were carried out between 2001 and 2012, we analyze support for national governments and EU in the ten countries which joined European institutions during this lapse of time. We find that macroeconomic conditions did not alter EU support before accession and that only inflation altered EU support after accession, while it kept constant for unemployment. Therefore, EU seems to be punished on the basis of inflation when it is in charge. Draft – please do not cite without authors’ approval 1. Introduction In the European system of governance, national governments havean ambivalent position: while they cannot formally influence someimportant aspects of economic and monetary policies, due to the independentmandate of the ECB and the budgetary rules imposed sincethe Maastricht Treaty in 1992, national governments still have room for maneuver. First, they set out the conditions under which the ECBcan act.Second, they can voice their concerns within the Council of theEuropean Union, which is the institution deemed to be the most powerful executive and legislative body by intergovernmentalists (Moravscik 1993, 1998), to advance theirnational interests. Most importantly, they have not given up their fiscalcompetences at the national level. Nevertheless, nationalgovernments have undoubtedly lost some policy competences towards European Union institutions over the years. Now EuropeanUnion, alongside with national governments, is formally responsible forproducing a number of policies, notably in the economic area (Brouard et al. 2011).Also, negative integration has reduced member states’ capacity to intervene in the economy and to regulate the capitalist economy (Scharpf 2000, 2009).