Public Misperceptions of European Integration: A Comparative Study of Six EU Member States

Do Europeans have a correct understanding of key characteristics of the European Union (EU) or are they rather misinformed? What kind of misperceptions do citizens have when it comes to the EU? And what are the characteristics of individuals that hold the most severe misperceptions? This paper sheds light on these questions and presents results of a novel population based survey that was fielded in six EU member states in February 2019. Despite a rich literature on the factors that explain Euroskepticism (Hobolt and De Vries 2016, De Vries 2018), we know very little about the level of knowledge that Europeans have about the EU and the extent to which they might be misinformed (for exceptions, see Karp, Banducci, Bowler 2003; Carl, Richards, Heath 2019). Given the complex nature of the political system of the EU and the low salience of EU issues for most of the last decades, it might be unrealistic to expect many citizens to have a good understanding of EU related facts. However, this situation seems to be fertile ground for the spread of erroneous information and “Euro myths”. In fact, the Euro myth website of the EU – an attempt of the European Commission to debunk myths – now lists more than 700 different false claims about the EU that exist in the public realm. Such myths can play a particularly important role when they are mobilised in a populist fashion. Hence, misperceptions about the EU might be widespread. We build on the American public opinion and political psychology literatures, and on the findings from recent research on EU public opinion to theorize why citizens might hold misperceptions and how we can explain their nature and origins. Our theoretical starting point is Zaller’s Receive-Accept-Sample model (Zaller 1992): citizens generate survey responses on EU related matters based on those (few) considerations that are salient at a particular moment when they are asked about an issue. In the absence of precise information that might be stored in their memory, individuals rely on heuristics and, in turn, group serving biases are likely to play an important role (Hobolt and Tilley 2014). Moreover, these survey responses are biased in a systematic way by citizens’ ideological positions on the cultural dimension of conflict (GAL-TAN) or their attitudes towards European integration. Hence, we hypothesize that a vast number of citizens has misperceptions about the EU, irrespective of whether they support the EU or oppose it. Yet, we expect citizens who are culturally open to be less biased against the EU than those who are culturally closed. Thus, we expect negative misperceptions for instance to be muted among individuals who hold a European identity. To test these conjectures, we use a variety of measures, including the perceptions that citizens have of the budget of the EU, its administration, and the authority of the EU vis-à-vis the member states. Our survey was conducted online and involves samples of about 1000 respondents from Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Poland, and Spain.