Since the early 1990s, public support for the political system of the EU has come to the center of scholarly attention. In past research, a multitude of factors which explain public support have been unveiled. As for the EU, a prominent variable is European Identity. Identification with the collective of Europeans was found to be positively related to support for the EU. However, most studies, do not take the individual conception of European identity into account. But collective identities – studied at an individual level – mean different things to different people, depending on the characteristics which are used to demarcate the in-group from the out-group. Hence, theoretically identification with the collective of Europeans does not necessarily lead to stronger support for the EU. This, however, should be the case, if the conception of European identity corresponds to a compatible image of the EU and thereby connects the conception of identity to the political system.
In this paper, I aim at showing that support for the political system of the European Union depends on the conception of European Identity and how it corresponds to the image of the EU. Also, conceptions of national identity and their compatibility with European identity are taken into account. In order to do so, a theoretical framework is presented which tries to make sense of the relationship between conceptions of collective identities and public support for the EU and incorporates the concept of collective identities into a general model of support for the political system of the EU. The effects are then analyzed empirically using the 71.3 Eurobarometer data from 2009. Thereby, the analysis contributes both theoretically and empirically, to our understanding about the effects of different conceptions of national and European identity on support for the political system of the European Union.
