Explaining support for European integration

Abstract

This chapter deals with the impact of citizenship attitudes on popular support for European integration, an issue that has been extensively investigated in previous research. The distinctiveness of the new analysis in this chapter is that it allows a comprehensive empirical testing of a wide set of theoretical claims advanced in the literature that, due to data limitations, have seldom been comparatively assessed on their own, and never against the competing impact by the dimensions of citizenship explored in this volume. The modelling of systemic-level features, and of their interactions with individual level variables, is carried out to adjudicate between rival theoretical perspectives. The findings show that citizenship attitudes are important determinants of people’s overall evaluations of EU integration, without any significant variation across Western, Southern or Eastern Europe.