The Effect of the Euro Crisis on Public Support for European Integration in Eurozone Countries: a Multilevel Analysis

It is widely assumed that the prime drivers of public support for European integration are identity factors such as the exclusive sense of national identity or anti-immigrant sentiment. However multiple studies highlight that utilitarian factors also play an important role, most notably in times of economic crises. Furthermore, there are good reasons to treat identity- and utilitarian factors of support as interrelated. Thus, I assume that contextual economic factors like output drop and high level of unemployment would (i) directly affect public attitudes towards further European integration and (ii) have a positive moderating effect on the impact of cultural factors on attitudes towards European integration. These assumptions should be valid only for the debtor states of the Eurozone, as they suffered severe output losses and had to implement structural fiscal reforms that included substantial welfare retrenchment. The salience of the Euro in national political debate, governments‘ ideological affiliation, as well as individuals‘ political partisanship, would be included in the analysis as control variables. The assumptions would be tested by the means of multilevel modelling applied on the eighth round of the European Social Survey data.