European Integration as a Mass-Elite Cleavage? Empirical Evidence and Conceptual Ambiguities

During the critical juncture faced by European countries and the EU in recent years, European integration has increasingly turned into a salient dimension of political contestation in the domestic politics of member States. This notion is reflected by studies on the "politicisation" of the EU, on "EU issue voting", on "Euroscepticism" especially among parties and national populations. In parallel, concerns about a prospective gap between masses and political elites, fuelled by the success of many "challenger" parties and by accusations levelled against "mainstream" ones, have become enshrined in the well-known label of "constraining dissensus". To what extent, however, does European integration qualify as a proper political cleavage? First of all, this paper seeks to locate the question empirically in the "here and now". Building on the doctoral research of one of us, we leverage the evidence provided for ten European countries, at mass and elite level, by the first wave of the transnational research project EUEngage. Rooted in the tradition of studies on "issue congruence", our approach allows us to expand and update previous findings, casting a careful and comprehensive look at divisions on EU matters among masses, among elites and between the two levels. At the same time, the paper understands the political dimension of European integration as an appropriate example of lingering ambiguities in the appraisal of mass-elite discrepancies. Identifiable pitfalls are connected with (but not limited to) the top-down or bottom-up nature of the issue, the absence of a standard yardstick in the measurement of "congruence", the increasingly acknowledged multidimensionality and ambivalence of EU-related preferences. Perhaps the most pressing ambiguity, though, stems from the fact that European integration is susceptible to different framing at the hands of different political actors in different national contexts, raising the question of whether the supposed cleavage really is autonomous.