Euroskepticism in the Crisis: More Mood than Economy

Jo Ritzen (), Klaus Zimmermann () and Caroline Wehner
Additional contact information
Jo Ritzen: affiliation not available

No 8001, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Before the Great Recession, rising income inequality within the European Union member states has been considered to be one driver for an increasing Euroskepticism. Using rich data on attitudes towards European integration from the Eurobarometer (EB) surveys, we revisit the issue by analyzing the relation between macroeconomic indicators, socio-economic background variables, individual attitudes and the level of Euroskepticism within the 27 EU member states for the period 2006 to 2011. Our analysis shows that Euroskepticism has increased by on third during the financial crisis, while income inequality on average stayed stable. We find that the increase in Euroskepticism is mostly due to " mood:" the fear of losing cultural identity and financial expectations and by large unrelated to economic background variables like income inequality. We find evidence that negative financial expectations are positively related to Euroskepticism in Western European countries and negatively related to Euroskepticism in Eastern European countries. That suggests that financially pessimistic people in Western Europe might interpret European integration as a threat to their financial situation, while Eastern European people might view it as a chance to improve their economic situation.

Keywords: unemployment; economic growth; expectations; income inequality; Euroskepticism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 J31 O43 O52 P48 Z18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2014-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - completely revised version published as 'Euroskepticism, Income Inequality and Financial Expectations' in: B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, 2015, 16 (2), 539-576

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8001.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp8001

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().