Subjective financial insecurity and support for European unification

ABSTRACT

The utilitarian approach to pro-EU attitudes – noting that citizens establish their preferences based on their perceived self-interest – remains the dominant one in the social science literature on these attitudes. Yet previous work following this approach has overlooked the role of subjective financial insecurity. Based on prospect theory and marginal utility theory, we argue that individuals who feel financially insecure determine their preference for further European unification in terms of the gains and losses for themselves and that, since they are disproportionately sensitive to economic losses, they display more risk aversion and oppose further macro-political changes in the form of further European unification. Using hybrid models and 15 waves of a representative panel survey conducted in the Netherlands and covering 2008–2023, the evidence strongly supports our expectation. Controlling for individual education, occupational status, individual income, gender and age, subjective financial insecurity is cross-sectionally and longitudinally related to support for European integration. People generally feeling financially insecure (those who over time increased their feeling of financial insecurity) display significantly less support for further European unification than people who generally feel financially secure (people who over time did not feel more financially insecure).

KEYWORDS:

• Attitudes
• European Union
• financial insecurity
• perceptions
• panel data
• the Netherlands

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Stephan Dochow-Sondershaus, Carl-Friedrich Elmer, Antonio Jaime-Castillo, Giuseppe Pietrantuono and participants in the 2023 Annual Conference of the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) for their feedback regarding previous versions of this study. We are also grateful to the two anonymous referees for their insightful comments, which have helped to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We hereafter use ‘European unification’ and ‘European integration’ as synonyms.

2 Although support for further European integration and EU support are not synonymous and sometimes even have different determinants (e.g. van den Hoogen et al. 2022), in this section we focus on the latter as it has been the main theme of the debate between utilitarian and non-utilitarian approaches to EU-related attitudes.

3 ‘How does the financial situation of your household now compare with what it was 12 months ago?’ for the retrospective version and ‘What are your expectations for the next 12 months: will the next 12 months be better, worse or the same, when it comes to the financial situation of your household?’ for the prospective version.

4 In this paper we make use of data of the LISS (Longitudinal Internet studies for the Social Sciences) panel administered by Centerdata (Tilburg University, The Netherlands).

5 Replication files for all models are available at https://figshare.com/s/96b93cb0687759e58acb.

6 The average trends in these two dimensions may differ from the patterns found in the multivariate analysis as the latter control for compositional characteristics of the population.

7 Van den Hoogen et al. (2022) conducted a cross-sectional study of the configuration of pro-European attitudes in the Netherlands and reported non-significant associations between income and the two considered outcomes: being an instrumental pragmatist (supportive of EU membership for strict instrumental reasons) or a non-federalist (supportive of EU membership but not supportive of EU enlargement).

8 Table 1 shows that the professional supervisor variable has a negative and significant effect on the FE component and a positive and significant effect on the BE component. Few people change their social class during their professional lives. Hence one possible explanation for these contradictory findings is that this FE estimate may be influenced by measurement error and the limited statistical power of the test.

9 Imputed values were estimated with the program Blimp (Enders 2022; Keller and Enders 2022). Blimp uses a Bayesian fully conditional specification and latent response variables to treat categorical variables. We estimate 5 imputed datasets (with 20,000 burn-in iterations and 5 final iterations in 5 chains) and the values were clustered by the respondent’s ID to reflect the two-levels structure of the data. After the imputation, the models were estimated with Stata.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the project ‘Education and Pro-European Orientation among Spain’s Youth: An Inquiry on Causal Mechanisms’ (YOEDER) sponsored by Spanish State Research Agency (PID2021-127561OB-I00). The LISS panel data were collected by Centerdata (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) through its MESS project funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

Notes on contributors

Juan J. Fernández

Juan J. Fernández is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences, University Carlos III of Madrid. His research focuses on European integration, gender & politics and social policy.

Céline Teney

Céline Teney is Full Professor of Macrosociology at the Institute of Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests encompass political sociology, European integration, and migration and integration.