Students' perception and attitude towards the European Union

Although European Union (EU) policies in member-states represent an important share of adopted legislation and thereby the EU has a great impact on European citizens’ everyday life, the EU is still perceived by many as a distant entity. Low voters’ turnout at elections to the European Parliament, which creates a certain gap between the EU policymaking and European citizens, causes additional doubt among citizens about the quality of democracy at the EU level. On the other hand, the EU strives for a positive image in the eyes of the citizens to retain support for its existence and increase legitimacy for its policies. With the absence of real European identity, EU policies are the most important thing that unite EU citizens. Image and attitudes towards the EU and its democracy is even more relevant in turbulent times of constant crises such as financial, migration, health and energy crises along with Brexit, in which EU often failed to deliver efficient policies that would be supported by all EU member-states and majority of citizens. Moreover, citizens hold different views of how to conceptualize and judge democracy in the EU, and these differences are influenced by their national backgrounds and the fact of whether they regard the national level or the EU as a polity. In this paper we are interested in how different backgrounds impact perception about the EU, democracy in the EU and attitudes towards the EU among students. To answer our research question we will analyse several focus groups conducted among students at University of Ljubljana. All students are master students at political science department and have good knowledge about functioning of the EU. We selected on purpose knowledgeable students to be able to observe what is the perception about the EU and its democracy among students that are informed, since predominantly in studies of attitudes towards the EU we observe general population that also includes citizens that are misinformed or lack the knowledge about the EU. We anticipate that students have different perception about the EU depending on whether they come from candidate countries, younger EU member-states (such as Slovenia) or from other (older) EU member-states. The analysis will be performed in qualitative approach in MaxQDA software.