More, not Less: Favoring Further Integration in Europe’s Times of Crisis

• In Event: Public Opinion and Political Support

Abstract

Europe is often characterized as being in a state of permacrisis. Much of the current literature on public opinion and EU integration focuses on explaining the growing wave of Euroscepticism in response to crises, particularly the Euro and Schengen crises. This research provides valuable insights, but it ignores the conditions under which ordinary voters favor more integrative policy responses. This paper will examine public opinion and elite policy responses to recent European crises to answer this central question: What factors cause public opinion in European countries to produce national policies that favor integration? For example, the Euro and Schengen crises posed major challenges for the European Union’s jurisdictional architecture. Both crises exposed deficiencies in the institutional structures meant to handle them (e.g. the European Central Bank and the Schengen open border regime). Ultimately, the former resulted in deeper integration, while the latter did not.
I will combine a micro-level analysis of how identities and other individual traits drive policy preferences and individual voting patterns in times of crisis with a meso-level analysis of how national governments respond to public opinion and pursue either insular or integrative policy. The paper aims to advance the literature on the role of public opinion in European Integration by examining the ways crisis activates latent social identities to drive policy response preferences and the mechanisms by which citizens’ articulation of these preferences lead to actual policy outcomes.

Author

• Hannah Lee Radner, Syracuse University