Whereas much research exists about the question why citizens generally are in favour or against the EU and European integration, we know almost nothing about the reasons why citizens opt for a specific speed of integration. The paper takes the desired speed as dependent variable and asks for the variation in the desired speed. Explanations that incorporate the features of the timescape of national political systems will be tested against common economic, political, and cultural explanations. It is argued that temporal aspects like the future planning horizon, the produced political stability, the volatility of policy change, and the actual speed of European integration form a national timescape that is interpreted by the public as the appropriate temporal setting for political change. I test my hypotheses with a multilevel analysis and thereby advance upon the public-opinion literature by including systemic factors that are often neglected. In the paper, I combine temporal macro-indicators from several databases with Eurobarometer-data.
