Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

The aim of this paper is to address the responsiveness of EU budget policy to EU citizens’ preferences. In order to do so, public opinion changes and EU budget allocations are examined through a covariation method which permits to evaluate opinion-policy congruence in the EU. Responses to 275 Eurobarometer Survey questions are used to elicit public opinion changes with respect to policies financed through the EU budget. As a scarce degree of congruence emerges from the analysis, the paper proposes to integrate public opinion preferences into budgetary allocations by promoting the direct participation of citizens in the budgetary procedure. In addition, it calls for the re-alignment of the current multi-annual financial programming to the terms of the European Parliament and Commission in order to increase public control over both institutions' actions.