In the end, will we all be Europeans? A two-phase analysis of citizens’ sentiment towards the EU

Giancarlo Manzi, Sonia Stefanizzi () and Pier Alda Ferrari
Additional contact information
Sonia Stefanizzi: University of Milan-Bicocca

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 2016, vol. 50, issue 6, No 12, 2535-2551

Abstract: Abstract In the last decades an increasing effort has been expended to spread out citizens’ awareness for the European Union as an institution, but more recently, mainly due to the economic crisis spread out from 2008 onwards, less positive attitudes have started to form. Regular monitoring on the state of citizens’ view towards the EU, performed through opinion surveys, has undoubtedly shown a constant decline in citizens’ enthusiasm. However, findings from this paper reveal that, even in times when increasing unemployment, deprivation and bad life standards are hardly hitting the EU member states, especially in Southern countries, an underlying predisposition still prevail when individual characteristics and features of the countries where citizens live in are taken in due account. This hidden attachment is analyzed on the subset of EU15 countries using a two-phase approach: (i) first, potential latent features both at individual and contextual level explaining the EU attachment are searched; then (ii) these features are combined in a two-level model where the individual expectations from the EU and the expenditure in research and development of the country result the best predictors.

Keywords: European sentiment; Eurobarometer survey; Nonlinear principal component analysis; Multilevel models; Latent variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11135-015-0275-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:qualqt:v:50:y:2016:i:6:d:10.1007_s11135-015-0275-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11135-015-0275-0

Access Statistics for this article

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology is currently edited by Vittorio Capecchi

More articles in Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().