The Economy and EU Support: The Dynamics of Rationality Before, During and After the Crisis

It is well established that public attitudes towards the European Union (EU) are strongly determined by economic factors. Decades of studies have shown that national economic performance on the aggregate level and subjective socio-economic perceptions on the individual level strongly correlate with levels of EU support. However, less is known about if and how the importance of economic explanation has changed over time. The Great Recession and the subsequent Eurozone crisis remarkably increased popular dissatisfaction with the European integration. Against the backdrop of heightened saliency of economic issues, multilevel economic governance and increasingly blurred economic responsibility between national and supranational actors, it is likely that economic factors were a significant driver behind the changes in public sentiment. Does this mean that the rationality argument has gained importance in shaping EU attitudes amid the crisis? Combining theoretical frameworks of economic voting and Euroscepticism, this paper compares ordinary and extraordinary times, seeking to reveal the temporal dynamics of the relationship between the economy and EU support. Using data from the European Election Studies (EES) from before, during and after the turbulent crisis years (2004, 2009 and 2014), we test the rational explanation of EU support while controlling for other traditional determinants such as support for domestic political institutions, identity, emotional attachment and political ideology. Finally, we will look at the conditionality of the link between the economy and EU support by exploring the differences between bailout and non-bailout countries as well as debtor and creditor countries. We hypothesize that economic effects on EU attitudes are more pronounced in recipient countries, which have suffered more from the crisis and have been subject to stringent austerity measures imposed by external institutions.