Is Brexit an outlier? Euroscepticism and public support for European integration

ABSTRACT

This paper uses data from six rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS), between 2004 and 2016, to examine attitudes towards European integration across countries. Using both individual responses and country-level variables, we analyse factors influencing Euroscepticism; how these factors are changing over time; and whether they may signal a latent potential for Brexit-like outcomes in different countries. Controlling for a unique combination of demographic, political and macroeconomic factors, we find individuals with higher levels of income and education, and those with more left-leaning political views to be more supportive of European integration, while those who are older and right-leaning to be less supportive. Using predicted values from our empirical analysis, we find median voters’ attitudes diverging across European countries over time, with an increasing number of countries moving closer to the threshold values observed among voters in the United Kingdom in 2016.

KEYWORDS:

• Attitudes on European integration
• Euroscepticism
• political views on governments
• political economy
• Europe
• Brexit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Countries that have experienced increasing electoral representation by Eurosceptic parties include: Spain (Vox), France (National Rally), Italy (Northern League), Finland (The Finns), Poland (Law and Justice Party), Germany (Alternative for Germany) and Hungary (Fidesz).

2 The minimum sample size is reduced to 800 individuals in countries with a population of less than 2 million.

3 It is important to note that the ESS is not a panel data set; each round of the ESS samples different individuals, and does not follow individuals across time.

4 This variable measures the difference between what a country receives from and what a country pays into the EU budget. Therefore, a positive value reflects a country contributing less to the budgetary balance than the amount it is receiving, whereas a negative budgetary balance reflects a country contributing more to the EU budget than it receives from it.

5 Available at http://parlgov.org.

6 The ESS surveys are conducted during the five-month window from September to January. As a result, when considering the formation of governments across countries, we use a cut-off date of September 1st. In other words, if an election was held in June 2006, our government formation measure will include results from this election in the 2006 ESS round (Round 3) whereas if an election was held after September 1st 2006, our government formation measure would not include the results from this election in the ESS 2006 round.

7 Refer to Figure 2 for an example of this showcard from Round 2.

8 See for example Epstein et al. (2006) or Enns et al. (2017).

9 Due to the inconsistencies in including all countries across ESS rounds, we omit from this presentation those countries who are included in fewer than 4 of the 6 rounds used in our analysis.