Understanding variation in public support for European integration

Abstract. Much of the research on the European Community focuses on elites and institutions and as a result downplays the importance of the mass public in determining the direction of European integration. A common justification for this viewpoint is that members of the public provide a stable reservoir of strong support for European integration. Recent political events, however, raise doubts about this depiction of a 'passive public'. Consequently, there is a need for a fuller understanding of European attitudes. We specify a number of hypotheses dealing with the effects of international trade interests, security concerns, and demographic characteristics on cross-national and cross-sectional variations in public support for European integration. Using Eurobarometer surveys and OECD data on EC trade from 1973–1989, we investigate these hypotheses in a pooled cross-sectional model. Our statistical results reveal that an individual's level of support is positively related to her nation's security and trade interests in EC membership and her personal potential to benefit from liberalized markets for goods, labour, and money.     

Divided but united: explaining nested public support for European integration

Academic and general interest in public support for European Integration is on the rise. Theoretically, the utilitarian, identity, reference, cue-taking and signalling models have been developed to explain this perplexing phenomenon. While these models have been tested, there is no comprehensive up-to-date account of how well they perform separately, relative to each other and across levels. Empirically, this study utilises a data set with 110,873 respondents from the European Social Survey. Methodologically, a multilevel model is used to address causal heterogeneity between levels. The study shows that ‘attitudes towards multiculturalism’ at the individual level and ‘corruption’ at the country level are the strongest predictors. When interacting levels within models, it is demonstrated that individual trust in the national political establishment is being moderated by the level of corruption in a country in influencing support for European integration. On this basis, two models are proposed, named the ‘saviour model’ and the ‘anti-establishment model’.     

Present at creation: Italian mass support for European integration in the formative years

Abstract.  This article analyzes a period usually neglected in empirical studies of public opinion and European integration: the formative years between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. The analysis is based on one country – Italy – in which the European process was a source of deep political cleavage in the formative phase. The study of the sources and dynamics of support in these years sheds a different light on the determinants of support. More specifically, a pooled multivariate logistic analysis of six surveys conducted between 1952 and 1970 shows two things. First, it shows that public support in Italy was driven mostly by considerations that were affective and political rather than economic and utilitarian. Second, it explains under which conditions the political factors behind support (and opposition) for European integration in the 1950s and 1960s changed over time, mostly in reactions to international events and to developments in European institutionalization. The article points to the bottom-up nature of change in public support for European integration; changes in public opinion affected party positions, rather than vice versa.     

Learning and re-learning regime support: The dynamics of post-communist regimes

Abstract. The political support of citizens of new democracies reflects two sets of experiences. Initially, people are socialized into an undemocratic regime; then, they must re-learn political support in relation to a new regime. In an established democracy, it is difficult to disentangle the effect of early socialization and current performance because both refer to the same regime. However, this is both possible and necessary in countries where there has been a change in regime. Critical questions then arise: When, whether and how do citizens determine their support for their new regime? At the start of a new regime past socialization should be more important but, after a few years, current performance should become more important. We draw on 47 Barometer surveys between 1991 and 1998 in ten more or less democratic post-communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to test the relative importance of early socialization influences, the legacy of the communist past, and the political and economic performance of new regimes. We find that economic and political performance explains the most variance in support and, secondarily, the communist legacy. Early socialization is insignificant. However, contrary to economic theories of voting, the impact of political performance is greater than the impact of economic performance in post-communist countries – and its impact is increasing.     

Youth in post-communist Hungary

Peter Agócs is co-author with Sándor Agócs of a series of studies on the fate and fortune of various social segments of post-communist Hungary.     

Explaining individual-level support for privatization in European post-Soviet economies

Abstract. This article explores the sources of individual-level variation in support economic privatization in seven European post-Soviet countries. It tests economic utilitarian and psychological explanations of variations in support for economic privatization. The economic utilitarian explanation posits that individuals seek to maximize their potential material gains from economic liberalization. The psychological explanation posits that if individuals are generally risk averse, they are not likely to support economic privatization. These hypotheses are then tested using two separate regression models. The first model estimates pooled data from across all seven European post-Soviet economies. The second model is a pooled analysis that interacts country-specific dummy variables with each of the independent variables in order to examine the country-specific effects of the responses. The results show that the economic utilitarian and psychological explanations are both strong predictors of why some support and others oppose privatization in the seven European post-Soviet countries.     

Political allegiance and European integration

Under what conditions and to what extent do national publics come to accept the increasing efforts of state elites to build new political institutions that transcend the constitutional frontiers of the nation-state and affect their interests beyond their direct control? This paper explores the role of national publics and social policy in the process of national and European integration. A theory of allegiance is proposed as particularly useful for analyzing this topic. Allegiance is defined as the willingness of a national public to approve of and to support the decisions made by a government, in return for a more or less immediate and straightforward reward or benefit. National publics accept the efforts of their national state elites to build new trans- or supranational political institutions on the condition that this guarantees or reinforces economic (e.g. employment) and social (e.g. income maintenance) security in the national context. European integration depends on a double allegiance, consisting of a primary allegiance to the nation-state and its political elite and a secondary or derived allegiance to the EC or EU. Secondary allegiance, however, exists only to the extent that European integration facilitates nation-states to provide the resources upon which primary allegiance hinges. The theory of double allegiance specifies theoretically the mechanism explaining the link between national economic and social conditions, and public support for the European Union.

     

Failure or long-haul? European elections and European integration

The impact of the direct election of the European Parliament is assessed with reference to the hopes of the proponents of European integration—increased weight for the Parliament, legitimacy for the institutions and achievements of European integration, and the development of trans-national political forces. Particular examination is made of the low level of turnout in the elections, of the absence of any Community-wide focus on personalities or on issues in the campaign and of the problems of the Socialist, Christian Democratic and Liberal party federations. One effect offering an integrative prospect is the emerging élite of full-time trans-national politicians.     

The role of civil society in European integration

This paper explores the concept of ‘civic society’ in Western political thought, charting the changing understanding of this concept through history and its manifestation in contemporary political and social life. The paper draws out the inferences for our understanding of the role of government, particularly with the European Union and its relationship with citizens and other representative community‐based and non‐governmental organisations. The paper argues that the fundamental values that are central to civic society underpin the proposed EU Charter on Fundamental Rights and maintains that effective European integration requires responsible participation by Europe's citizens. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

How political parties frame European integration

This article analyses how political parties frame European integration, and gauges the consistency of their argumentation. Over the course of investigation, one can see how actors' positions are justified, and how the European Union is perceived (i.e., what forces give rise to Euroscepticism and Europeanism). It is argued here that the parties' framing of issues depends on the interests they traditionally defend at the national level, their general positions on European integration, and whether or not they belong to the established political actors in their respective countries. The coding approach enables the relation of frames to actors and positions, moving beyond the techniques employed by existing studies that analyse the media presentation of European integration. Sophisticated frame categorisations are provided to capture the complex structure of argumentation, going beyond a simple dichotomy of economic and cultural frames. Relying on a large and original media dataset covering the period 2004–2006, six Western European countries are investigated.     

Immigration and support for redistribution: survey experiments in three European countries

In times of increasing globalisation scholars put considerable efforts into understanding the consequences of immigration to the welfare state. One important factor in this respect is public support for the welfare state and redistribution. This article presents results from a unique survey experiment and a panel study in three European countries (Norway, Germany and the Netherlands) in order to examine whether and how individuals change their preference for redistribution when faced with immigration. Theoretically, citizens with high incomes should be especially likely to withdraw their support for redistribution because they fear the increased fiscal burden, whereas other types of citizens might ask for more compensation for the increased labour market risks caused by immigration. The empirical evidence reveals that only respondents with high incomes and those who face low labour market competition withdraw support for redistribution when faced with immigration.     

Citizen support for European Union membership: the role of socialisation experiences

The article explores whether European Union membership has a socialisation effect on citizens’ attitudes towards their country’s membership of the EU. Using a sample of 15 Western European countries, it is shown that this is the case. First, evidence is provided of a positive lifelong socialisation effect: citizen support for their country’s membership of the EU increases with years spent living in an EU member state. Second, it is shown that those who joined the EU during their formative years are less supportive of the EU, whilst those who spent their formative years in a non-democracy are more positive about EU membership. The size of these effects is very small in comparison to that found for the lifelong socialisation effect, suggesting that the lifelong socialisation process of continued EU membership is much more important for EU attitudes. This study offers new insights into the formation of EU attitudes.     

Dimensionality,ideology and party positions towards European integration

The rise of political contestation over European integration has led many scholars to examine the role that broader ideological positions play in structuring party attitudes towards European integration. This article extends the existing approaches in two important ways. First, it shows that whether the dimensionality of politics is imagined in a one-dimensional ‘general left?right’ form or a two-dimensional ‘economic left?right/social liberal-conservative’ form leads to very different understandings of the way ideology has structured attitudes towards European integration, with the two-dimensional approach offering greater explanatory power. Second, existing approaches have modelled the influence of ideology on attitudes towards European integration as a static process. This article shows that the relationship between ideology and European integration has changed substantially over the history of European integration: divisions over social issues have replaced economic concerns as the main driver of party attitudes towards European integration.     

European integration and electoral democracy: How the European Union constrains party competition in the Member States

The assignment of policy competencies to the European Union has reduced the divergence of party policy positions nationally, leaving the electorate with fewer policy options. Building upon insights from spatial proximity theories of party competition, the convergence argument predicts convergence particularly in policy domains with increasing EU competence. As the policy commitments that derive from EU membership increase, parties become more constrained in terms of the feasible policy alternative they can implement when in office. The analysis uses manifesto data at the country‐party system level for nine policy domains. It uses ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation with country fixed effects, a lagged dependent variable and country corrected standard errors. Controlling for other factors that could plausibly explain policy convergence, the models also assess whether the convergent effect of party positions varies across different types of parties. The main finding is that in policy domains where the involvement of the EU has increased, the distance between parties' positions tends to decrease. The constraining impact of EU policy decisions differs between Member and non‐Member States. This effect is more apparent for the policy agendas of larger, mainstream and pro‐EU parties in the Member States.