EU Support in Ordinary and Extraordinary Times: Economic Crisis or Crisis of Political Trust?

The European crisis has been a critical moment in the European Union (EU). It revealed structural economic imbalances across its member states but also coincided with a political crisis, i.e. a crisis of democratic representation and loss of trust in European and domestic institutions. How has this changing context of crisis impacted upon public support for the EU? Starting from the premise that the crisis has had both an economic and political/legitimacy component, we examine the explanatory value of utilitarianism and cue-taking approaches in modeling Euroscepticism in times of crisis. The crisis increased the salience of economic issues and raised public awareness of the EU’s role in national economic policy, suggesting a strong link between the economy and EU attitudes. But it has also resulted in popular dissatisfaction and declining levels of political trust, posing limitations to the economic explanation. Our time-series multilevel analyses of Eurobarometer data (14 waves; 2003-2017) compare EU attitudes during ordinary and crisis times. Our findings demonstrate that the economic effects on EU support have decreased over time whereas the effects of political trust in domestic government have increased. This suggests that –contrary to conventional wisdom– it is the political rather than the economic component of the crisis that drove the rise in Eurosceptic sentiment in times of crisis. The European crisis was associated with problems of governability and lack of trust in institutions, suggesting a strong political component especially in countries that were most affected by the recession and that became subject to external intervention. We discuss potential explanations of our findings, and point towards avenues for further research. Our paper takes a diachronic and comparative perspective. We envisage our paper fitting under the workshop’s topic (3) Euroscepticism in the party systems of the EU.