A Differentiated Responsive European Union? Unraveling the connection between differentiated integration and public evaluation.

The paper combines works on differentiated integration (DI) with responsiveness studies. Whereas we see that the European integration process is differentiated between the member states of the EU, we rarely know if a countries’ actual level of differentiation has an effect on the public support of integration. In the paper, we argue that to establish a connection between differentiation and public support, two connections have to be fulfilled: (1) citizens perceive the level of opt-outs a country realizes (2) citizens adjust their future evaluation of the integration process in relation to this perception. We analyze these connections for all member countries for the years 1986 – 2018 by combining all differentiations in primary and secondary law with public opinion data from the Eurobarometer. Employing time-series cross-section analysis, the paper advances our knowledge of Euroscepticism by introducing differentiation as a crucial dimension of public support and delivers the first systematic analysis if differentiation is linked to public support for the EU at all.