Public Preferences for European Integration in Complex Political Space: Variations across Europe

Preferences for European integration are often assumed to be clustered with opinions on immigration, Islam, globalization, nationalism and other related issues. Furthermore, they have been shown to vary in an inverted U-curve pattern with left-right political ideology, at the level of political parties and elites. When looking at the preferences of citizens and voters, however, the picture is more complex: preferences for Europe vary in complex ways both along the left-right and along the conservative-progressive dimensions. Recent work based on case studies from Western and Southern Europe has demonstrated the need to explore further how these preferences for Europe fit the political landscapes in different countries. This paper uses data from the European Social Survey to explore in a systematic way how preferences for European integration vary with (a) self-placement on the left-right scale, (b) policy preferences for redistribution, and (c) preferences over immigration policy. It charts these patterns for all countries in Europe and over time as well using flexible non-parametric methods of analysis (generalized additive models, GAM) and more appropriate measures of dependence than the usually-employed Pearson correlation and regression coefficients. Finally, the paper discusses possible explanations for the temporal and cross-country variation.