A blessing and a curse? Examining public preferences for differentiated integration

The EU is a system of differentiated integration (DI). Policy areas have reached different levels of integration (vertical DI), and integrated policies have not been uniformly applied across the EU’s member states (horizontal DI). While we have witnessed an increase in DI as well as scholarly work describing and explaining it, we currently know very little about what the public thinks. In this paper, we aim to map public preferences for DI, and to examine differences between Euroskeptic and pro-EU citizens. To do this, we rely on public opinion data from the Eurobarometer from 2004 to 2018 and novel survey data from 2020. Our key finding is that support for DI has increased in recent years, and public preferences on the issue have become more crystallized (less don't know answers). That said, important individual-level differences exist. While Euroskeptic segments of the population support DI, more pro-EU segments prefer deeper and more uniform integration. This suggests that while DI may be a blessing to signal more responsiveness to Euroskeptics, it may simultaneously prove a curse and alienate more pro-EU parts of the population.