Research on Support for the EU and the Integration Process...
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  HomeSmallArrow Richard C. Eichenberg and Russell J. Dalton, 1993.

    Europeans and the European Community: The Dynamics of Public Support for European Integration, International Organization, 47/4 (Autumn 1993), 507-534.

    Europeans evaluate the European Community according to its economic performance, political salience, and role in international relations. During the last two decades their measured attitudes toward European integration warmed especially when inflation rates fell, as the EC share of the country's trade expanded, when EC elections and referenda increased attention to the community, and to some extent during periods when East-West tensions were relaxed. Europeans did not vary their support according to their countries' share of the EC budget. Thus, notwithstanding Denmark's 1992 rejection of the Maastricht Treaty and the end of the Cold War, recent EC reforms that increase monetary stability, intra-EU trade, and political attention are all likely to maintain or increase citizen support for the EC. These findings result from a model that blends comparative political economy with international relations in one of the first applications of pooled cross-section and time-series analysis to the comparative study of public opinion.

 

  HomeSmallArrow Richard C. Eichenberg and Russell J. Dalton, 1997.

    Convergence And Divergence In Citizen Support For European Integration, 1973-1996, paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington.

    The purpose of this paper is to expand our understanding of the determinants of citizen support for European integration. We briefly review existing studies of European opinion and highlight a finding that is found in almost all of them: the importance of economic and utilitarian considerations in models of support for integration. Nonetheless, we also note that the time coverage of these studies is now dated. In particular, no available research includes the crucial post-Maastricht period that has been so characterized by turmoil and polarization. In subsequent sections, therefore, we describe an updated data set that extends our own previous findings to the period 1973-1996. Analysis of these data takes the form of a pooled cross-section and time-series design (CSTS); we estimate the model using both familiar GLS (generalized least squares) estimation methods and the newer methods suggested in the work of Beck and Katz (1995; 1996).

    Four principal conclusions emerge from the analysis. First, there has been considerable cross-national convergence in levels of support for integration, a trend that somewhat reduces (but does not remove) the explanatory power of cross-national explanatory factors, such as national traditions and export profiles. Second, despite this convergence across countries, the impact of domestic economic conditions --especially the inflation rate-- continues to exert a strong influence on citizen support for integration. Third, there has been a divergence in the relative impact of economic factors within the original five members of the EEC and the three later entrants, a divergence that may complicate consensus building in the EU. Finally, the analysis shows that, with very few exceptions, the results produced by GLS methods and by the newer methods of CSTS analysis are robust.

 

  HomeSmallArrow Richard C. Eichenberg and Russell J. Dalton, 1998.

    Post-Maastricht Blues: Public Opinion, The Political Economy, And Recent Trends In Citizen Support For European Integration, Paper presented to a Seminar of the Center for West European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, March 1998.

    This paper is a substantial revision (in fact, an overhaul) of Eichenberg and Dalton 1997, immediately above. It begins by explicitly modeling the cross-national convergence of support levels observed in the previous paper. Respecified to reflect this convergence, the model fit is improved dramatically. In addition, the analysis demonstrates that the correlation between economic conditions and support for European integration broke down in the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty. The remainder of the paper asks why the relationship between economic conditions and support for integration should have eroded after 1991.

    Five principal conclusions emerge from the analysis. First, there has been considerable cross-national convergence in levels of support for integration, a trend that somewhat reduces (but does not remove) the explanatory power of cross-national factors, such as national traditions. Second, despite this convergence across countries, the impact of intra-European trade and domestic economic conditions continue to exert an important influence on citizen support for integration. Third, examination of citizen support for integration of specific policy areas, such as foreign policy, social security, and monetary policy, suggest that the recent decline in citizen support represents a specific reaction to EMU and its budgetary implications rather than a more generalized rejection of the integration process or the extension of the EU’s competence to political and other policy areas. Fourth, there is evidence that the impact of intra-European trade and objective economic circumstances became weaker in the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty but that citizen perceptions of economic conditions became a stronger correlate of support than they had been previously. Finally, the analysis shows that, with very few exceptions, the results produced by GLS methods and by newer methods of CSTS analysis are very robust ( Beck and Katz (1995; 1996) ). The theoretical and political implications of these findings are explored in the concluding section .

 

  HomeSmallArrow Richard Eichenberg, 1998.

    Measures and Models in the Study of Public Opinion and European Integration. Paper in preparation for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, Sept 1-3.

    This paper will evaluate the robustness of existing evidence concerning the relationship between economic and utilitarian calculations of public support for European integration. It will examine: alternative measures of both dependent and independent variables; alternative estimation methodologies, and alternative temporal and cross-national samples.

 


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