EXPLANATIONS OF POLITICAL EURO-SCEPTICISM AT THE INDIVIDUAL, REGIONAL AND NATIONAL LEVELS

ABSTRACT

This article investigates to what extent nationalist and anti-out-group drives contribute to the explanation of political euro-scepticism, in addition to economic and political drives. The authors disentangle individual-level, regional-level and country-level effects by using the European Social Survey, covering 21 European countries (n=34,160), which is enriched with region and country characteristics. Perceived threat from immigrants as well as political distrust increase political euro-scepticism, explaining low levels of euro-scepticism among higher educated people, higher income categories and socio-cultural specialists. At the contextual level, the authors find that scepticism increases with the distance to Brussels. Moreover, it is found that in countries where television broadcasts are dubbed, euro-scepticism is lower than in countries using subtitles. The authors find small effects from intra-EU trade and number of foreign tourists. In particular, differences between countries in political euro-scepticism are explained by duration of EU membership.

Keywords:

• euro-scepticism
• ethnic competition
• multilevel analysis
• regions

Acknowledgements

This contribution has been presented and discussed at the WAPOR 2005 conference in Cannes, and at the ECSR Conference 2005 in Paris. Moreover, it was also discussed in a seminar at the University of Trento. Thanks go to the Department of Sociology of the University of Trento, Italy, making working on this contribution possible. Moreover, the project is financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

Notes

¹Comparable to previous research on euro-scepticism, we use the term ‘euro-scepticism’ as an attitude towards the EU. Mudde proposed to disentangle ‘euro-scepticism’ and ‘EU-scepticism’. However, the term ‘euro-scepticism’ is so broadly used to describe scepticism toward European integration that we decided to stick to it.

²Comparing the distributions of the policy items available in both ESS and Eurobarometers, the similarities are remarkable when the international and European levels are taken together, on the one hand, and the regional and national levels, on the other.