The role of personality traits and political trust in people’s attitudes toward EU membership

Abstract

ABSTRACT Whereas the role of personality traits and political trust have long been argued to impact people’s political attitudes, only recently have scholars of the European Union (EU) integration begun to take them into consideration while trying to explain people’s attitudes toward the EU. In an effort to explain the support for EU membership among citizens of Albania and Kosovo, we build a series of ordered probit models using as key independent variables two core personality characteristics, self-reported Optimism and Extraversion, and one surface characteristic, political trust. We found evidence that Optimism, Extraversion, trust in EU politicians and the judiciary, as well as trust in domestic politicians positively impact people’s support for EU membership. However, we found no evidence that people’s trust in the domestic judiciary associates their attitudes toward EU membership. We tested our hypotheses with a probability simple sample of public opinion data gathered in Albania and Kosovo in 2017.