Is the European Union a ruler? A natural experiment on attribution of responsibility

Economic-voting literature has shown that support for the EU depends on macroeconomicvariables - mainly unemployment and inflation - just like support for national governments. This suggests that citizens reward or punish the EU according to the state of the economy, as if EU was deemed responsible for it. In order to test this hypothesis, we need to prove that EUsupport depends on the state of the economy only when the EU is actually in charge. Based on Eurobarometer surveys which were carried out three years before and after the 2004 wave of accession, we analyze economic support for the EU in the ten countries which joined European institutions on this occasion. We find that macroeconomic variables did not affect support for the EU before accession and that they considerably altered it after 2004, which confirms that citizens attribute responsibility to the EU for the state of the economy