How Identity Interacts with Economic and Societal Rationality to Drive Public Opinion on the European Union. The Role of Crime, Unemployment and Immigration

Abstract

This paper examines the relative power of identity and utilitarian explanations of the variation in public support for the European Union (EU) as well as the relationship these have with one another. Using Eurobarometer data from 1990 to 2007, the results in this paper demonstrate that contrary to previous research, national economic and societal utility calculations about the EU have greater explanatory power than identity issues. It is also found that unemployment, crime and exclusive national identity mediate the relationship between immigration and EU support. In the light of these findings, the article draws implications for politics at EU and national level.

Key Words:

• Public opinion on the European Union
• identity
• utilitarianism
• relationship between identity and utilitarianism
• European integration
• immigration

Notes

Societal issues refer to issues such as immigration, crime and corruption. This terminology is consistent with the one used in political communications.

This study was though solely based on the period from 1992 to 2001.

Examples are political parties such as Alleanza Nazionale and Lega Nord in Italy, and factions within the Labour Party and the Conservative Party (from 1997, the leadership of the Conservative Party adopted though a more eurosceptic stance) and political parties in the political periphery such as UKIP and BNP in the United Kingdom.

That is to say territorial, physical, psychological (sense of belonging), economic and social support.

The results of these studies are also only based on data from 1 year.

EB data in the period from the early 1990s to 2007 (and equally today) show moreover that citizens consider inter alia unemployment, crime and to a lesser extent immigration issues as the primary concerns that national governments and the EU should tackle as a priority. Direct concerns about the EU or about national identity are often not seen as primary.

These countries were EU members throughout the study period.

Model building in pooled cross-sectional time series analyses is an iterative process: the final model is the result of a series of diagnostic estimations and re-estimations.

In model 2, the significance value of the coefficient for exclusive national identity is over 0.05, but the effect of this variable on EU support may have been partly picked up by the foreign inflows and interaction (between Foreign inflows, Unemployment and Crime) variables. These variables are significant.

But more acutely since the second part of the 1990s.

Such as Alleanza Nazionale and Lega Nord in Italy, Vlaams Blok in Belgium, Front National and MPF in France, UKIP and BNP in the United Kingdom, Progress Party in Denmark and Republikaner Partei in Germany.

Such as factions within the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom.

Especially in factions within mainstream parties and in non-mainstream parties.

In other words, economic and societal instrumental motivations have a unique effect on EU support, controlling for other variables such as the sense of exclusive national identity of respondents.

In other words, the elements that constitute the interaction term. The constitutive terms have been centred to avoid multicollinearity problems.

These issues have surfaced in televised political debates, politicians' interactions with the electorate as well as in polls (for example, Ipsos Mori, 2010; Watson, 2010).

The ‘don't know’ response was recoded as a middle category in the benefit question.