Why do so many people hate EU bureaucracy?

From the article:

Except for the residents of Brussels, Luxembourg and Frankfurt, we would not expect anyone to have regular interactions with the EU’s administrative apparatus. There is also a clear lack of detailed and reliable substantive reporting about the EU bureaucracy. Given these circumstances, how can we explain the very strong attitudes many citizens hold about the topic?

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In a recent study, I argue that heuristics play an essential role in shaping people’s view of the EU bureaucracy. Heuristics are mental shortcuts that allow humans to make quick judgements in a broad variety of situations. Their role in human decision-making was most famously explored by the pioneering authors Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemann, whose work sparked the emergence of a broad scientific literature. In line with some perspectives in this literature, I suggest that, with respect to citizens’ views of the EU bureaucracy, a variation of the so-called representativeness heuristic may be at work.

What role does this heuristic play in the formation of citizens’ attitudes? Most European citizens have quite comprehensive experience with and information about domestic bureaucracies. This is true for both the local and national levels. Specifically, they often directly interact with local public administrations, observe the quality of public services and receive comprehensive information about the successes and failures of domestic bureaucracies through the media and the reports of friends and family members. These wide-ranging experiences allow citizens to form a clear picture of what a “prototypical” bureaucracy looks like.

Although the EU bureaucracy exhibits a range of substantive organisational differences when compared to most domestic bureaucracies, heuristics may lead citizens to believe that their experiences with domestic institutions are a proper template to assess the EU bureaucracy as well.

Thus, when asked for their opinion of the EU bureaucracy, many people likely transfer their prototypical image and evaluations of the qualities of domestic bureaucracies to the EU public administration. This means that if citizens believe their domestic bureaucracy is corrupt, they will be more likely to believe that the EU bureaucracy is corrupt as well. Moreover, if citizens have high levels of trust in their domestic public administration, they might also have more trust in the EU’s public administrative apparatus.