Elucidating EU engagement: rethinking dimensions of supranational participation

ABSTRACT

Concerns about the quality of the EU’s democratic participation are reflected in much of the research on EU attitudes and voting behavior in European Parliament elections or EU referendums. Yet few – if any – have considered other types of behavior that may be associated with a vibrant EU citizenry. We propose a new theoretical framework for capturing the broad range of participatory activities in which citizens may engage at the EU level, then use original survey data from the United Kingdom to test the validity of these dimensions. We also assess the extent to which predictors from existing literature (identity threat, economic concerns, political attitudes, and sociodemographics) explain these various forms of behavior. Results suggest that citizens pursue a wide array of participation avenues, with different sets of motivations underpinning each one. These findings are essential for better understanding individuals’ political (dis)engagement, both with the EU and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• EU engagement
• European identity
• political behavior
• political participation

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 14^th Biennial Conference of the European Union Studies Association (Boston, 2015) and the 73^rd Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association (Chicago, 2015). The authors thank Mitchell Smith, Jan Beyers, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Amber Curtis also thanks Opinium Research, LLP for its assistance administering this survey, made possible by funding from the Colorado European Union Center of Excellence and the Center for British and Irish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. The internet has undoubtedly changed the nature of traditional participation while simultaneously opening new venues for engagement (Krueger 2002). An emerging vein of research explores variation in who participates online versus in person (Vicente and Novo 2014).

2. The precise effect of identity-based considerations likely depends on the political context. In many EU countries, Eurosceptic elites have sought to activate and/or aggravate fears about the EU’s effects on national identity (Kopecký and Mudde 2002).

3. The London-based polling firm Opinium LLP administered the survey online by inviting almost 7,000 of its standing panelists to participate; over 2,000 did for a response rate of nearly 31%. Opinium weighted final results according to national targets for gender, age, social class, employment status, and geographic region based on data from the Office for National Statistics and National Readership Survey.

4. In contrast to elsewhere, political participation in the UK does not appear to be in decline (Armingeon and Schädel 2015), though youth disengagement is especially severe (Sloam 2014).

5. In the middle range, 31.77% claimed they had voted in the 2009 European Parliament elections. This closely matches the actual UK turnout rate of 34.7% according to the European Parliament website (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/aboutparliament/en/000cdcd9d4/Turnout-%281979-2009%29.html).

6. Alpha = 0.612.

7. The Online Appendix reports descriptive statistics for all variables.

8. There is no variance at the regional level (captured as twelve subnational units: 9 in England plus Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) for any dependent variable, therefore we do not use multilevel modeling.

9. Alpha = 0.887.

10. This last item was recoded prior to constructing the index so that higher responses indicated a stronger preference for staying in the EU.

11. Bars indicate the magnitude of moving from the minimum to maximum on each significant (p ≤ .05) variable, holding all else at its mean. Calculated using Long and Freese’s (2006) spost commands in Stata.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Colorado European Union Center of Excellence [CEUCE Graduate Fellowship] and the Center for British and Irish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder [Ogilvy Graduate Travel Fellowship].