EU Attitudes Research Articles

Crisis situation and crisis policymaking: a comparison of Germany and Hungary in two refugee crises

ABSTRACT Why was policymaking in the 2015–16 refugee crisis so conflictual, while policymaking in the Ukrainian refugee crisis of 2022 proved consensual? We argue that the crisis situation – the problem pressure, policy-specific institutional context of crisis policymaking at the EU level, and the resulting political pressure – made a crucial difference. Based on a Policy Process Analysis (PPA) dataset that systematically tracks the policy debate, we test and corroborate our argument by comparing the policymaking in two countries that differ sharply in their domestic asylum policies and their attitudes toward the EU: Hungary and Germany. However, the country-specific contexts still make a difference: in spite of the similarity regarding crisis-specific policymaking in the two countries, the policy outcome varies between them, independently of the crisis, as a result of the differences in domestic asylum policies and EU attitudes.

The differential impact of EU attitudes on voting behaviour in the European parliamentary elections 2019

ABSTRACT EU attitudes are multidimensional and likely to matter differentially for voting across different parties. The 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections offer a unique setting for testing the differential effects of multidimensional EU attitudes, as the election results entailed increased political fragmentation – with notable pro- and anti-EU party groups in the EP gaining strength. This article examines the importance of EU attitudes on electoral choice and zooms in on the influence of specific EU attitudes on party voting in EP elections (‘EU issue voting’). We use original survey data collected around the 2019 EP elections in ten EU member states, which include a fine-grained measurement of EU attitudes. We find evidence for EU issue voting in all countries, albeit not equally structured across countries. EU issue voting matters across all party groups with affective and performance evaluations having the strongest effects.

Gender attitudes and the new cultural divide in Europe

This paper investigates how gender attitudes relate to the new cultural divide between cosmopolitans and communitarians in Europe, defined by immigration and EU attitudes. We examine how gender attitudes vary across this divide, how large and diverse the ideological groups are, and differences between Western Europe and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Using data from the European Values Study 2017, we conduct a latent profile analysis to investigate the most common of nine possible combinations of attitudes regarding gender, immigration, and the EU. In Western Europe, we find substantial divisions over gender attitudes across profiles, but not over immigration and EU attitudes. In CEE, we find disagreement over immigration attitudes coupled with centrist EU attitudes and ambivalent gender attitudes. In both regions, gender attitudes appear to cross-cut attitudes relating to the new cultural divide. These findings have implications for understanding how socio-cultural values shape political behavior and preferences in Europe.

The Emerging New World System and the European Challenge

Abstract In the early 2020s we live in the transition period between two world systems, the Old World Order (OWO) and the New World Order (NWO), in a deep ‘polycrisis’. Therefore, the term transformation has recently appeared in official EU documents as well as in political science literature. The transition to the NWO has begun with this crisis management and it will produce a radical transformation of the entire global architecture in the 2020s. In its conceptual framework this paper focuses on the contrast between ‘de‑coupling’ and ‘de ‑risking’, as it has been explained very markedly in the recent speeches of the president of the European Commission, Ursula van der Leyen (EC 2023a), and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan (The White House 2023). This contrast symbolises the US policy, concentrating more on cutting or reducing connectivity among the various policy fields, versus the EU policy turning them safe and interdependent. These approaches represent the US and EU attitude in the emerging New World Order, and primarily in their relationships to China.

Opinion polarization of immigration and EU attitudes between social classes – the limiting role of working class dissensus

ABSTRACT This study examines polarization in political opinions toward immigration and the European Union between occupational classes, i.e. structural polarization. We maintain that two conditions must hold to indicate structural opinion polarization: high between-class divergence and high within-class consensus. Our main contribution is to study these two conditions systematically for a wide variety of immigration and EU-related topics. Using data from four high-quality German surveys spanning three decades, we document three main findings. First, we find substantial between-class divergence: respondents in typical working class occupations express substantially more unfavorable opinions about immigration and the EU than the upper classes across the majority of survey indicators. Second, however, we also observe considerable opinion heterogeneity within the working class. This lack of within-class consensus limits the potential of mobilizing the working class as a group on the basis of anti-immigration and anti-EU sentiments. Third, while we do not document durable increases in structural opinion polarization over time across most of our opinion indicators, we do draw attention to those individual indicators that show relatively high polarization. Overall, our results suggest limited opinion polarization between occupational classes on immigration and EU issues in Germany.

Does the prospect of further sovereignty loss fuel Euroscepticism? A population-based survey experiment

ABSTRACT Whether further European integration is desirable is an ongoing question in public opinion research: both extant research and the outcome of various EU-related referendums show that many citizens hold negative views on proposals that lead to further loss of national sovereignty. An important issue thus arises: does the prospect of such additional sovereignty loss increase negativity towards the EU? This study attempts to answer this question using a pre-registered original survey experiment conducted among members of a nationally-representative high-quality Dutch panel. Our focus is on how exposure to proposed abolishment of EU member states’ right of veto affects EU attitudes. In addition, we analyse whether the exposure effect is shaped by 1) citizens’ prior populist attitudes and 2) the Eurosceptic character of the medium. Concerning the former, informed by recent in-depth qualitative research, we hypothesise that populist attitudes aggravate the extent to which exposure to potential loss of national sovereignty leads to more negative EU attitudes. Concerning the latter, we hypothesise that exposure via a Eurosceptic medium might either aggravate or abate the extent to which the newspaper message leads to more negative EU attitudes. We discuss our findings and provide suggestions for further research.

Geographies of EU dissatisfaction: Does spatial segregation between natives and migrants erode the EU project?

ABSTRACT This article examines whether the spatial segregation of immigrant groups conditions the relationship between the share of migrants and attitudes towards EU integration. Do varying degrees of clustering of migrants in space diminish, mitigate or exacerbate the effect of immigration on EU attitudes? We combine data from the European Social Survey with fine-grain spatial segregation measures captured by the D4I project across four European Union countries. We find that those who live in regions with a greater share of migrants from Eastern Europe have more positive attitudes towards the EU but that this positive influence diminishes in highly segregated areas. The analysis also shows that the effect is primarily driven by the working class. Our findings have important implications as they show that the joint consideration of both the levels and the distribution of migrants in space is crucial to understanding the relationship between immigration and attitudes towards the EU.

What does it mean to be pro-European? The case of the European centre-left and centre-right in Austria, Germany and the UK

Europhilism has traditionally been associated with centre-left and centre-right parties, those parties that contributed to the development of the EU. However, centrist parties vary in their support of European integration. Yet, we know comparatively little about the extent to which these parties support European integration. Should they be classified as Eurosceptic, or do they continue to support European integration? A comparative analysis of national and European manifestos of centre-left and centre-right parties in Austria, Germany and the UK between 1990 and 2019 shows that pro-European attitudes can be split into three patterns: enthusiast, equivocal and critical Europhiles. These patterns are combined with Vasilopoulou’s patterns of Euroscepticism to create a continuum from support for to opposition to European integration, thereby recognising that centre-left and centre-right party attitudes can change across time. These findings have implications for research on centre-left and centre-right parties’ EU attitudes by identifying the nuances of the pro-European position.

Political news diets and political attitudes in the 2019 EU elections in Italy

ABSTRACT This study investigates Italian citizens’ news diets during the 2019 European election and examines the relationship between these diets and citizens’ attitudes to three central political issues: trust in the EU, prejudice towards migrants and populist attitudes. Combining a self-report survey with passive data recording real news consumption, the study identified three main user profiles. It verified that News Avoiders (meagre news diets) associate with distrust in the EU, anti-immigrant positions and populist attitudes; News Seekers (cross-media and in-depth information) align with open-minded attitudes towards Europe and immigration; the TV-News Centric (almost single-channel news) identify with moderate political attitudes.

The associations between exclusive collective victim beliefs and negative attitudes toward the EU

The present study investigated the effects of historical exclusive collective victim beliefs (i.e., the perceived uniqueness and severity of the ingroup’s past suffering) on attitudes toward the European Union. Three cross-sectional online surveys (total N = 729) tested the hypothesis that historical exclusive victim beliefs are related to negative EU attitudes. We also hypothesized that the associations between exclusive victim beliefs and EU attitudes are mediated by the perceived similarities between the EU and former perpetrators, belief in the existence of victimhood-related conspiracies against the ingroup, and perceived lack of acknowledgment of the ingroup’s victimization by the EU. Study 1 demonstrated, Study 2 and Study 3 directly and conceptually replicated the mediating role of perceived similarities between the EU and former perpetrators, suggesting that historical analogies provide orientation for contemporary group members. Additionally, in Study 2, we obtained evidence for the mediating role of the belief in the existence of an EU-related conspiracy against Hungary as a mediator, and in Study 3, for the mediating role of the perceived lack of acknowledgment of the ingroup’s victimization by the EU. The findings have theoretical and practical implications regarding the role of historical victim beliefs in formulating present-day attitudes.

Integrationists, Critical Europeanists and Pessimist Europeanists: EU attitudes among students in a German university

We investigate attitudes toward the EU of a sample of students enrolled in a German university by using a mixed-methods data design. We conducted an online survey among students at the University of Göttingen (N=730) and asked them closed questions on the EU enlargement, the allocation of authority at the EU level, the way democracy works at the EU level, and an open question on their wish for the future of the EU. We then ran a latent class analysis of the recoded answer categories from the open question and of our set of closed questions. Our three-class solution highlights variation in support for the EU among students. Indeed, while the vast majority of the respondents take highly supportive attitudes towards the EU, we can distinguish between ‘Integrationists’ (in favour of pursuing the EU integration project; 68% of the sample), ‘Critical Europeanists’ (supportive of the EU but dissatisfied with the way democracy works at the EU level; 20.50% of the sample) and ‘Pessimist Europeanists’ (supportive of the EU but afraid of the implosion of the EU; 11% of the sample). Our study highlights the importance of the use of non-standardised measures and mixed-methods data collection for understanding citizens’ attitudes towards the EU in a more nuanced way.

Tabloid Media Campaigns and Public Opinion: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Euroscepticism in England

Whether powerful media outlets have effects on public opinion has been at the heart of theoretical and empirical discussions about the media’s role in political life. Yet, the effects of media campaigns are difficult to study because citizens self-select into media consumption. Using a quasi-experiment—the 30-year boycott of the most important Eurosceptic tabloid newspaper, The Sun, in Merseyside caused by the Hillsborough soccer disaster—we identify the effects of The Sun boycott on attitudes toward leaving the EU. Difference-in-differences designs using public opinion data spanning three decades, supplemented by referendum results, show that the boycott caused EU attitudes to become more positive in treated areas. This effect is driven by cohorts socialized under the boycott and by working-class voters who stopped reading The Sun. Our findings have implications for our understanding of public opinion, media influence, and ways to counter such influence in contemporary democracies.

More or less integration? Examining support for different EU future scenarios in Austria

ABSTRACT Understanding public opinion on the EU remains a pressing issue. In contrast to previous studies on EU attitudes in general, we pose the following question: Which factors help us to understand public support for five specific scenarios for the EU’s future? We promote the still undertheorized identity approach that has developed alongside the utilitarian and the cue-taking perspectives. We argue that a European Social Capital – composed of trust, norms and networks with other Europeans – is related to support for further integration scenarios. The multivariate analyses are based upon a mass survey conducted in Austria. Our results show a significant correlation between higher levels of European Social Capital and positive attitudes towards scenarios for more integration. This adds to the identity approach in the literature on EU attitudes. Our study has important implications for the EU’s reform debate. If people feel emotionally connected with other Europeans, they are willing to accept deeper integration processes. Pure economic arguments seem insufficient.

Understanding Farmers’ Intentions to Adopt Organic Farming in Albania

Organic agriculture in Europe is expanding, yet is still in the early stages in less developed areas of Europe. Understanding the factors of converting to organic agriculture is a key component for both policy design and attaining effective support for the organic sector from the government, donors, or the private sector. Therefore, the study attempts to explore the determinant factors of farmers’ intentions to engage in organic farming based on primary data collected through a farm survey in Albania. Results show that subjective norms, perceived behavior control, favorable attitudes toward organic farming conversion, as well as awareness of risk from conventional farming accompanied with information awareness are positively associated with the probability of converting to organic farming. Farmers’ perceptions of EU policy opportunities and attitudes towards environment protection are negatively associated with farmers’ tendency to convert. The study findings call for the use of financial and non-financial policy instruments for supporting conversion to organic farming and increased information on opportunities and costs expected from the integration into the EU single market.

The long shadow of attitudes: differential campaign effects and issue voting in EU referendums

Can voters be persuaded by referendum campaigns? This article develops a theoretical model that synthesises the existing literature on campaign effects and issue-voting by arguing that the strength of pre-existing attitudes conditions voter receptivity to campaign arguments, thereby also determining their eventual vote choice. Using original panel data for the 2015 Danish opt-out referendum, there is evidence that attitude strength matters for whether voters are responsive to persuasion during campaigns. The article finds that voters with the most strongly-held attitudes felt well informed and certain about the consequences of the vote even before the start of the campaign, whereas voters with moderately-held attitudes are found to be more prone to believe those campaign arguments that are consistent with their EU attitudes, changing their vote intentions accordingly. Finally, voters with weakly-held attitudes were equally persuadable for the No and the Yes side of the campaign, but they are also the least pre-disposed to pay attention to campaign messages. The conclusions discuss the broader implications of the findings for our understanding of EU referendum campaigns.

'This country is OURS': The exclusionary potential of collective psychological ownership.

Political campaign slogans, such as ‘Take back control of our country’ (United Kingdom Independence Party) and ‘The Netherlands ours again’ (Dutch Party for Freedom), indicate that right‐wing populism appeals to the belief that the country is ‘ours’, and therefore, ‘we’ have the exclusive right to determine what happens. We examined this sense of ownership of the country (i.e. collective psychological ownership [CPO]) with the related determination right in relation to exclusionary attitudes and voting behaviour. Among Dutch (Study 1, N = 572) and British (Study 2, N = 495) participants, we found that CPO explained anti‐immigrant and anti‐EU attitudes, and these attitudes in turn accounted for voting ‘leave’ in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the British sample (Study 2). Additionally, CPO was more strongly related to negative immigrant attitudes among right‐wing Dutch participants, whereas it was more strongly related to negative EU attitudes and voting ‘leave’ among left‐wing British participants. CPO contributes to the understanding of critical contemporary social attitudes and political behaviour.

Eurovisions: An Exploration and Explanation of Public Preferences for Future EU Scenarios.

Public opinion on the EU has received growing attention in the last decades, with an ever‐increasing number of studies examining various aspects of it. Surprisingly, most studies focus on attitudes towards the past and present of the EU, yet we know very little about public attitudes towards the future of the EU. This study helps to fill this research gap by examining attitudes towards the EU's long‐term future using a novel approach. We developed eight concrete future EU scenarios based on an inductive analysis of qualitative survey data. Subsequently, respondents (in an independent survey) ranked their top three scenarios according to individual preferences. Using multidimensional unfolding, we show that these preferences form three clusters ordered along a more versus less EU dimension. In a second step, we used multinomial logistic regression to examine not only who supports which scenario (socio‐demographics) but also which EU attitudes lead to which future preferences. The analyses identify distinct characteristics and attitudes that drive people's preference for a given scenario. Overall, we find that factors such as occupational levels or left–right attitudes are strong determinants of preferences for the future of the EU, and that specific EU support (performance and utilitarian evaluations) is more important than diffuse EU support (identity and affect).

The Politicisation of Transatlantic Trade in Europe: Explaining Inconsistent Preferences Regarding Free Trade and the TTIP

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) generated an unprecedented public contestation across Europe. In this paper, we focus on the sources of such backlash in European public opinion. Previous studies of this issue have analysed opinions on free trade and the specific agreement separately. However, not accounting for their correlated character could lead to biased conclusions about their determinants. To address this, we apply an innovative empirical approach and construct a set of bi-variate probit models to calculate joint probabilities for the different configurations of support and opposition. We validate that attitudes toward free trade and the TTIP have similar but not identical foundations. Inconsistent preferences are rooted in individual values, EU attitudes, and political cues, as well as treaty partner heuristics. Our innovative empirical approach offers an improved understanding of trade attitudes within EU’s multilevel context.

Euroscepticism and Protestant Heritage: The Role of Religion on EU Issue Voting

AbstractThis paper focuses on the historical ties between Protestantism and the nation-state, as well as between Catholicism and supranationalism, to widen the political science debate on different conditions of EU issue voting. Research suggests that the political context in each nation-state shapes the extent to which individual Eurosceptic attitudes influence the decision to vote for Eurosceptic parties. In addition to this, I expect that a nations' religious background responds differently to this relationship. Using data from the 2014 European Parliament elections, I show that citizens from predominantly Protestant countries actually decide for Eurosceptic parties if they hold negative attitudes towards European integration. In contrast, citizens from predominantly Catholic countries may or may not vote for Eurosceptic parties, but their voting decision is not based on individual EU attitudes such as support for European integration, trust in EU institutions or European identity.

Reshaping EU Attitudes? The Case of Social Democratic and Radical Left Parties in Spain and Italy

AbstractSince the beginning of the Great Recession, the issue of European integration has become increasingly salient in many European polities. The European left has adopted a different stance toward European integration, both in terms of economic and welfare‐state integration. On the one hand, radical left parties (RLPs) have always opposed a process of integration dominated by neoliberal logic; on the other hand, the social democratic parties (SDPs) have appeared as one of the main pro‐EU party families, identifying the EU as a privileged space in which to promote the building of a European social model. In this paper, we propose a binary comparison between RLPs and SDPs in Italy and Spain with a qualitative content analysis methodology. Our results show that albeit the crisis brought SDPs closer to a Eurocritical stance vis‐à‐vis the social‐Europe, this dimension along with the political integration are still dividing issues for the RLPs and SDPs families.