https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8807-6322
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Despite growing interest in both party and citizens’ support for the EU, the relationship between sources of public attitudes toward the EU and the values deriving from structural cleavages remains poorly observed. Particularly, the emergence of a new Transnational Cleavage appears theoretically and empirically disconnected from the state of knowledge on the sources of support and opposition for the Union. How do past explanations of support for the EU relate to individual positioning along Green-Alternative-Libertarian (GAL) and Traditional-Authoritarian-Nationalist (TAN) values? Our research aims to bridge public opinion studies on support for the EU with cleavage theory, going beyond the analysis of party positions, but focusing, instead, on citizens’ beliefs at the individual level. Our results show that transnational cleavage defines a dimension on which explanatory factors of support for the EU align consistently. Differently from the U-curve of the left-right cleavage, it shows a linear trend profiling pros versus opponents of the EU integration process.
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to Gary Marks for inspiration and precious comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 On this point, see also Donovan (Citation2017).
2 However, the evidence of a relationship between post-materialist values and support for the EU is contentious. Janssen, for example, argues that ‘postmaterialists are more positive about European integration than materialists because they have, on average, a much higher level of skills and not because they have different values’ (Janssen, Citation1991, p. 458) . Accordingly, cognitive capacities and post-materialism should be connected: values and personal skills (or status) mixe to produce support/opposition.
3 Examples of survey questions measuring these feelings are: ‘Some people may have fears about the building of Europe, the European Union. Here is a list of things which some people say they are afraid of. For each one, please tell me if you – personally – are currently afraid of it or not? (1) Our language being used less and less (2) The loss of our national identity and culture’. Among them some items relate specifically to threats coming from minorities. Questions of such kind read as following: ‘People from these minority groups are enriching the cultural life of (COUNTRY) • The religious practices of people from these minority groups threaten our way of life. • People belonging to these minority groups are so different, they can never be fully accepted members of (NATIONALITY) society.’
4 The impact of culture and identity is, however, complex. Some scholars have disputed the idea that national and supranational identities are necessarily opposed, claiming they can coexist as ‘nested’ identities (Medrano & Gutierrez Citation2001).
5 It is worth mentioning that TAN-GAL categories of parties were introduced in the CHES survey in 1999. Despite those categories were conceived before the theorization of a Transnational Cleavage, Hooghe and Marks consider them as at the “core” of the transnational conflict (see Hooghe & Marks, Citation2018, p. 123)
6 For a complete documentation see https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/methodology-data-documentation/evs-trend-file-1981-2017/ , EVS Trend File 1981-2017, ZA7503, v.1.0.0 (2021-05-04), doi:10.4232/1.13093.
7 The countries are Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.
8 For this question, respondents could also choose ‘other answers’ spontaneously.
9 Both for this battery of questions and for the previous question, we treated ‘no answer’ and ‘do not know’ as missing.
10 The Factor Analysis (pcf) shows a unique factor with strong relationships among variables: homosexuality = .79 ; abortion = .86 ; euthanasia = .81 . Variance explained 67.5%, Eigenvalue 2.02.
11 The Polychoric Factors Analysis shows a unique factor with an appreciable relationships among variables: environment protection = .70 ; libertarian = .71 ; no need of more authority = .58 . Variance explained 44.3%, Eigenvalue 1.33.
12 The parties considered into the analysis represent 95.9% of the preferences (appeal) expressed by the respondents.
13 The following variables are coded as follow: gender - (0) male, (1) female; age - 18–83 years old.
14 In political matters, people talk of ‘the left’ and ‘the right’. How would you place your views on this scale, generally speaking?’ Answers on 0 (extreme left) to 10 (extreme right) points scale.
15 Self-positioning on a 0–10 points scale where the lower values is ‘Incomes should be made more equal’ and 10 means ‘There should be greater incentives for individual effort’.
16 Levene's test is one of the more widely used tests of homogeneity of variances carried out prior to performing an analysis of variance. It tests the null hypothesis that the population variances are equal by carrying out an analysis of variance on the absolute deviations of observations from the group mean.