Location, location, location: national contextual factors and public support for European integration

Abstract:

Political scientists have extensively studied how the public forms its opinions about European integration, utilizing a variety of techniques and data sets while focusing on different units of analysis. Much of the public opinion literature suggests that lower-skilled workers are likely to have more negative evaluations of European integration. We argue, by contrast, that 'socio-tropic' evaluations of the effects of European integration on national redistribution and capitalist systems are more important than skill. To the extent that skill levels matter, they can be understood only through the frame of national factor endowments and varieties of capitalism. In addition, we find that other individual-level factors, such as ideology, are conditioned or attenuated by national contextual factors, suggesting that cross-level interactions are a promising direction for future research.