Citizens' Reactions to European Integration Compared

Overlooking Europe

Elizabeth Frazer, Florence Haegel, Virginie Van Ingelgom, S. Duchesne, V. Van Ingelgom

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349346400, 9780230354340
• eBook ISBN: 9781137297266
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Políticas europeas

Pre-financial crisis, EU citizens were 'overlooking' Europe ignoring it in favour of globalisation, economic flows, and crises of political corruption. Innovative focus group methods allow an analysis of citizens' reactions, and demonstrate how euroscepticism is a red herring, instead articulating an indifference to and ambivalence about Europe.

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Concepts and Theory: Political Sociology and European Studies

Sophie Duchesne, Elizabeth Frazer, Florence Haegel and Virginie Van Ingelgom

Citizens’ reactions to European integration have attracted a good deal of attention from social scientists over the last decades. Work conducted by researchers in the academic field of european studies has partly been inspired by the search for ways to solve Europe’s so-called democratic deficit. In most of this work, citizens’ opinions of the European Union (EU) or the integration process are analysed in relation to expectations regarding citizens’ support and legitimating attitudes (Van Ingelgom, 2010). Our standpoint in this book is mainly empirical, although it also takes into account the implications of sociological analysis of citizens’ political understanding and behaviour for democratic theory. European studies largely relied on statistical analysis of survey data before undergoing a qualitative turn by the end of the 1990s. Mixed methods are usually received positively in this field, as in other public opinion research areas (Risse, 2010). But, with regard to European attitudes, the discrepancy between the findings from the two distinct methodological traditions has become so striking that work is needed to reconcile them. This book aims to take a step in that direction. Contrary to other recently published works based on qualitative research (White, 2011; Gaxie, Hubé & Rowell, 2011) Overlooking Europe was not conceived as an alternative to statistical research but rather as a complement to it.

Our project design is built on four decades of European public opinion research. In the first section of this chapter, we aim to provide readers with an overview of research on citizens’ attitudes towards european integration. We present an account of the ‘state of the art’ which integrates the findings of the recent qualitative turn in european studies. Our research team though was only partly constituted by european studies researchers. So our hypotheses and research design were also strongly influenced by more general references from political sociology and from democratic theory that were relevant to the study of ordinary citizens’ relationships with politics and politicisation.

Literature review: European studies and citizens’ attitudes towards integration

Our review of social scientific research on citizens’ reactions to european integration distinguishes four main periods. In the 1970s, Lindberg and Scheingold (1970) accounted for citizens’ reactions towards european integration by way of the notion of ‘permissive consensus’. This framework, based on a utilitarian conception of citizens’ attitudes, lasted for more than two decades. It was challenged in the 1990s by the ambiguous results of the referenda related to the Maastricht Treaty ratification. This opened the way for a series of research projects that looked into a supposedly more affective dimension of the European political link, including the first qualitative research projects carried out in the field. The notion of ‘European identity’ was introduced at this period. By the time the French and the Dutch rejected the Constitutional Treaty by referendum in 2005, more and more research was being devoted to the analysis of the negative evaluations that sections of the European citizenry were expected to have developed, in line with the projects of extreme political parties. This third period of research was dominated by the notion of ‘euroscepticism’ and the thesis of growing polarisation of citizens’ opinions regarding european integration. This thesis, though, has recently been challenged by a growing number of qualitative research projects, whose results converge on the lack of salience of European issues for European citizens and their fundamental ambivalence on these issues.

System support and permissive consensus

From the very beginning, analysing European attitudes to integration forced researchers to cope with the difficulties of national comparison, raising numerous problems, epistemological as well as methodological. Eurobarometer surveys, funded by the European Commission since 1973 for ‘monitoring the evolution of public opinion in the Member States, thus helping the preparation of texts, decision-making and the evaluation of its work’,¹ early on came to constitute an invaluable source of data for European public opinion researchers, all the more for being freely available to academics despite the fact that they are not collected for academic purposes (Aldrin, 2010). Consequently survey research became dominant in the field. Analyses of attitudes to integration from the 1970s up to the turn of the century share common characteristics. In particular, they are mainly based on an analytical framework inspired by Easton (1965, 1975).

In his work on political systems and more particularly in the seminal Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965), Easton developed the concept of ‘support’ as a key element that permits the political system to perform its function of satisfying demands and thus to persist. Basically Easton distinguishes two categories of support. Specific support is generated by satisfaction with output, that is by the capacity of the political system to provide citizens with what they want. Diffuse support refers to the more general evaluation of what the political system represents for citizens. Diffuse support acts as a reservoir of support when the political system is no longer able to satisfy demand. It is a consequence of political socialisation that gives legitimacy to the system and/or its actors. Lindberg and Scheingold (1970) imported and adapted Easton’s framework in order to account for the distribution of attitudes towards the new European communities (Niedermayer & Westle, 1995). They distinguished utilitarian from affective support, a terminology that is still commonly used. They observed that in the Eurobarometer series the level of negative attitudes towards integration was quite low and that positive reactions dominated, but that there were a large remaining number of indefinite answers. They successfully labelled this distribution ‘permissive consensus’, and predicted that support could grow and become more consistent because of a spillover effect from specific (or utilitarian) to diffuse (or affective) support. The Eastonian framework they introduced dominated european studies for a long time.

Support has been measured thanks to the series of questions (called trend questions) asked regularly in all Eurobarometer surveys, allowing for systematic and comparative diachronic analysis (Schmitt, 2003; Schmitt & Scholz, 2005). Four questions – usually labelled ‘unification’, ‘membership’, ‘dissolution’ and ‘benefit’ (Niedermayer, 1995) – have mainly been used for this purpose, ‘benefit’ being more specifically considered the measure appropriate for utilitarian support.² However, a close look at the literature shows that these four questions have been interpreted and used in different ways. ‘Unification’ has been the most frequently used measure (Gabel, 1998) but many other configurations can be observed: for example ‘unification’ and ‘membership’ used together (Gabel & Palmer, 1995) or combined with ‘dissolution’ (Anderson & Kaltenthaler, 1996); ‘membership’ and ‘benefit’ together (McLaren, 2002) or complementing other trend questions regarding the desired speed of the integration process³ (Hooghe & Marks, 2004). Other researchers have used the four questions together under a single indicator constructed by factor analysis (Cautrès & Grunberg, 2007).

Analyses of citizens’ opinions regarding integration have covered a relatively large number of countries comparatively. A series of explanatory factors have emerged – at both the system and the individual levels – that account for the variation in support between countries. These include, for instance, individual and collective levels of expectation regarding benefits from integration (Anderson & Reichert, 1995; Gabel & Palmer, 1995); the structure and efficiency of national economies (Eichenberg & Dalton, 1993; Anderson & Kaltenhaler, 1996); the assessment of national economies and political systems (Anderson, 1998; Brigenar & Jolly, 2005; Kitzinger, 2003); the cognitive mobilisation and frequency of post-materialist values (Inglehart, 1990; Janssen, 1991) and more recently, perceptions of cultural threat, immigration and possible loss of welfare rights (McLaren, 2002) as well as geographical distance from the EU centre (Berezin & Diez Medrano, 2008).

European studies has also accumulated a solid knowledge of factors that influence support at the individual level. At this level, debates focus on socio-political processes, as analysts have demonstrated that individual support depends on the sociological characteristics of individuals and also on political orientations. The first major point of consensus here is the strong influence of social class on citizens’ opinions regarding the EU. In this sense, integration is indeed an elite process – citizens are all the more in favour of the EU if they are more educated, have a higher professional status and a higher income. These factors are obviously related to each other, but their effects also reinforce each other (Belot, 2002). Moreover, political interest and sophistication also seem to play a role: with similar levels of educational qualification, citizens interested in politics are more likely to support integration than are their uninterested counterparts. Political interest and sophistication provide citizens with the ability to make the EU, a changing and remote political object, their own. Jannssen in particular contested Inglehart’s thesis by showing that citizens who endorse post-materialist values are more likely to support the EU not because of these values but because they tend to be politically more sophisticated (Inglehart, 1990; Janssen, 1991). Political orientation and ideology, measured by party preference, also influence European support (Wessels, 1995b).

The emphasis on the socio-political processes that influence individual support for european integration highlights both similarities between EU member states and diversity within them. However, most authors acknowledge that nationality remains the most important explanatory factor in support for the EU, as the average level of support varies tremendously and stably from one country to another. A problem is that survey research is not the most appropriate technique for adequately taking context – national context – into account in explanation. This limitation was one of the incentives for the development of qualitative research in the field.

Maastricht and the end of the permissive consensus

By the beginning of the 1990s, support for integration seemed to be on the decline, as far as Eurobarometer data suggest. (Wessels, 1995a). The contested results of the referenda organised for the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty were interpreted as a confirmation that no spillover had occurred and that the ‘permissive consensus’ was falling apart. However, the notion of support remained central in european studies in particular because of the theoretical framework developed by Scharpf (1999). He introduced another dichotomy opposing two kinds of legitimacy: input-oriented versus output-oriented, referred to by him as ‘governing by the people and for the people’. Instead of linking the two as the Eastonian framework had, by postulating that specific or utilitarian support would produce diffuse support, Scharpf discussed the shortcomings in the legitimacy of a political system that relies only on outputs and does not have the elements required for input legitimacy. These would include, for instance, collective identity and stable significant levels of political participation.

Empirically, the research focusses on the actual relationship between evaluations of output – policies, laws and administration, by the EU institutions – and support for integration. Gabel (Gabel & Palmer, 1995; Gabel, 1998) considers that individual attitudes to integration do depend on rational calculation, where citizens evaluate costs and the benefits they can expect. He documents this with long-term data analysis. Although Gabel’s work is widely quoted, his analyses – and the corresponding expectation, according to which integration could move forward solely on the basis of output-oriented legitimacy – remain contentious. While he and others reacted to the failure of the spillover thesis by intensifying research on economic and utilitarian evaluations of the EU, others by contrast went on to investigate more closely the affective dimension and to look for any sign of a European identity in the making.

The Maastricht Treaty introduced European citizenship, and so it was considered to have intensified the direct relationship between citizens and the EU. To begin with, attitudes in favour of the EU were expected to conflict with former national allegiances. A series of works supporting the thesis of a growing antagonism between support for european integration and national identities was published in the second half of the 1990s (e.g. Mayer, 1997; Blondel, Sinnott & Svensson, 1998). Empirically, the growing interest in identity was accompanied by the introduction of a new question in Eurobarometer surveys, the so-called Moreno question (Moreno, 2006): ‘Do you in the near future see yourself as (nationality) only, (nationality) and European, European and (nationality), or European only?’ This replaced a former question where being European was proposed as a future possible complement to nationality.⁴ Despite the opposition suggested by the Moreno wording between the senses of national and European membership, the relationships here are far from simple. The statistical relationship between indicators of national and European attachments is almost always significant, but it varies in sign and intensity depending on the context (between European nations, and over time) and can even produce opposite results when alternative question wordings are used to measure the sense of membership at the two levels (Duchesne & Frognier, 2002, 2008). Indeed, by the end of the 1990s, Hooghe and Marks showed that national identity, as measured by Eurobarometer surveys, had opposite effects on support for european integration (Hooghe & Marks, 2004).

This complexity gave rise to opposing interpretations. Carey and McLaren (Carey, 2002; McLaren, 2006) have argued that these identities are conflictual, that is, a strong identification with one’s own national community prevents the development of European attachment. To the contrary, most analysts have come to support the thesis of a partially cumulative relationship between national and European identities at the level of the individual. They suggest diverse explanatory models in order to account for this partial overlap.

Some focus on the way different levels of identification interact, as in ‘nested identity theory’ (Herb & Kaplan, 1999; Diez Medrano & Gutierrez, 2001), the ‘marble cake’ metaphor (Risse, 2003) or the notion of ‘plural identity’ (Citrin & Sides, 2004). Others presuppose the multidimensionality of the notion of territorial identity itself. Schild distinguishes between evaluative and affective identities and considers the European level to be more evaluative and the national to be more affective (Schild, 2001). Bruter opposes the civic versus cultural dimensions of territorial identity (Bruter, 2005). Duchesne and Frognier, who argued early on that European identification complements the national, suggest distinguishing between a sociological and a political dimension of both national and European identification (Duchesne & Frognier, 1994, 2002, 2008).

This focus on the relationship between national and European feelings of belonging culminated in a series of publications directly dedicated to the search for European identity. Theoretically, these works mainly refer to social psychology. Indeed, the first book in the series was Changing European Identities: Social Psychological Analysis of Change (Breakwell & Lyons, 1996). Anthropologists and social psychologists were pioneers in the exploration of the notion of identity and more particularly collective identity, referring to groups such as classes, genders and ethnicities (Howard, 2000). Transnational Identities (Herrmann, Risse & Brewer, 2004) was clearly in line with this social psychological tradition. The question of any groups’ subjective borders is put at the core of the analysis, although it does not address the question of the specificity of political groups such as nations or continental unions (Duchesne, 2008; Gillespie & Laffan, 2006 are an exception).

Because identity is a subtle notion and because of the complexity of the statistical relationship between indicators of national and European senses of belonging, more and more questions have been posed against Eurobarometer surveys, and an increasing number of researchers have turned to alternative methods. The first influential book on attitudes towards integration based on a qualitative research project was Framing Europe (Diez Medrano, 2003).⁵ Combining analysis of press publications, public speeches and books with a large number of interviews with citizens and local elites in Spain, Germany and the UK, and with secondary analysis of Eurobarometer data, Diez Medrano offers the first in-depth investigation into the black box that holds the long-term strong influence of nationality on citizens’ attitudes towards integration. His own interest is not identity as such, but rather the cognitive and political processes that lie beyond representations of Europe and that involve prior identities like the national one. Diez Medrano shows vividly how integration has been framed very differently in the three countries he investigates, in close relation with their own post war history, in such a way that when people from different European countries answer Eurobarometer questions, they picture quite different objects when reacting to a common wording.

Two years later, Bruter published Citizens of Europe?, another mixed methods’ book which focusses on identity (Bruter, 2005). Sticking with standard psychosocial definitions of (European) identity, Bruter’s work is methodologically innovative, with experimental questionnaires and focus groups. He concludes that something like a European identity is in the making, more civic than ethnic in comparison with national identity. However, the focus groups he analysed consist mainly of students.

By the end of the twentieth century, european studies had broken out of the framework of spillover. Research was focussing on Europeans’ support for integration in two dimensions: utilitarianism and outputs on one hand, affect and identity on the other. However, the unexpected failure of the referenda on the Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands also opened the way to new research questions.

Euroscepticism and politicisation: The spectre of ‘euro-clash’

The thesis of the growth of euroscepticism, although mentioned from the mid 1990s as a corollary to the end of the permissive consensus, has received more attention from the beginning of the twenty-first century.⁶ Following Szczerbiak and Taggart (2003), who distinguish between hard and soft euroscepticism – rejection of integration as a whole versus opposition to certain aspects of it, especially policy related ones – the notion of euroscepticism covers a wide range of critical positions. Its most visible manifestations are the emergence and reinforcement within EU member countries of political parties who challenge integration and the failure of the French and Dutch referenda. Hence studies of euroscepticism deal mainly with two kinds of actors: political parties on the one hand (Taggart, 1998; Szczerbiak & Taggart, 2003; Hooghe, 2007) and European publics and their opinions on the other (Franklin, Marsh & McLaren, 1994; Gabel & Palmer, 1995; De Vries & Van Kersbergen, 2007; Wessels, 2007; Magni-Berton, Roger & Rucht, 2009).

Analysis of public attitudes towards integration had, over the previous decades, been mainly dedicated to the explanation of support; subsequently it focussed on the logics of rejection. Substantially, though, the two are closely related, as euroscepticism is often defined as the lack of support (e.g. McLaren, 2007). Empirically, the link is even more straightforward as support has commonly been analysed by using a measure of net support – that is, the ratio of positive to ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Concepts and Theory: Political Sociology and European Studies
• 2. National Frames: Reactions to a Multi-Level World
• 3. Social Gap: The Double Meaning of ‘Overlooking’
• 4. When Ambivalence Meets Indifference
• 5. Representation and Legitimation
• 6. Reflections on Design and Implementation
• Conclusion: Citizens Talking about Europe
• Post Script: Searching for the Grail. A Comparison of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods: the Viewpoint of a Survey Analyst
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Index