The Meaning of Membership: Polity Preferences among European Publics in the Shadow of Brexit

Recent research designates the single case of a member exiting from the European Union, Brexit, as a cautionary tale. Yet, if Brexit has demonstrated the challenges of leaving the EU, it has not erased Eurosceptic calls for disintegration. This paper builds on Brexit benchmarking theory and extends it to the EU polity, going beyond in-out measures of future disintegration. To what extent do evaluations of Brexit influence Europeans’ visions of the EU polity going forward? To answer this, we leverage the EU polity perspective to distinguish between preferences for thicker and thinner polities along the following dimensions: authority, values, expulsion and exit. Thicker polities have stronger authority, more shared values, more support for the expulsion of renegade states and harder exit options, whereas thinner polities have the opposite. Using a new public opinion survey fielded in 15 EU states in 2021, we explore between-country and within-country differences in these areas. Against our expectations, we find little evidence of between-country differences: voters in all countries support a thicker European polity but with (counter-intuitively) easier exit. Within-countries, we find that a positive Brexit evaluation leads to less support for a thicker polity, but not to an extent that would favour a thinner polity. Our findings hint that European publics favour a European polity marked by cohesion, robustness but also voluntarism on the part of member states.