Public Support for EU Membership in Turkey, Croatia, Macedonia and Iceland

With the economic crisis in the Eurozone, the matter of European integration regains attention in the public debates. This is not only the case within the EU but also in its candidate countries where the Eurzone crisis may have reduced the attractiveness of EU accession in the eyes of the citizens. The latter expect broad political and legal changes from their states’ accession process. Dependening on their socio-economic backgrounds and their wider political attitudes, individuals attach diverging political and economic expectations to an EU membership. Geographical factors play a role, too, as well as country-specific factors such as the smoothness of the accession process or the historical past of the candidate countries. The determinants of public opinion on EU membership have attracted vast scholarly attention. The regular Eurobarometer (EB) surveys reveal that public support for EU membership varies significantly across time and between the candidate countries. However, public opinion figures for the recent candidate countries, Croatia, Iceland, Macedonia and Turkey have not been analyzed so far in a systematic and comparative manner. Whereas a number of works exists on the Turkish case (Çarkoğlu 2003, Kentmen 2008, Çarkoğlu/Kentmen 2012) and others focus on member states (McLaren 2002, Osterloh 2011) or former candidate countries (Vetik et al. 2006, Ehin 2011), an effort to understand public support for EU membership comparatively and in a longitudinal fashion across the current candidates has not been undertaken yet. Therefore, this paper elaborates on the determinants of public support for EU membership in the four current candidate countries. By employing Multinomial Logit Regression Analysis to five Standard EB surveys from 2004 to 2010, our paper tests the suggestions of former research on public opinion on EU membership and serves as a basis to better understand the individual dynamics surrounding the domestic EU debates.