Beyond Euroscepticism: Conceptual and empirical dimensions of the positions towards European integration

The socio-political processes that the European Union and its Member States (MS) have gone through in the last decade - the euro crisis, refugees, Brexit and more recently the coronavirus pandemic and the climate challenge - have fuelled reactions related to the process of integration, giving rise to the (re) emergence of a new transnational cleavage (Hooghe and Marks 2017, 2021). The political controversies related to Europe have allowed political parties to mobilise the European issues from different frameworks, revealing that the orientations towards the European integration process are not linear or homogeneous but, on the contrary, have different roots and motivations. This research is based on the idea that a more complex political and attitudinal reality is hidden behind the orientations of the parties and that when we refer to Euroscepticism as a phenomenon structured in a single dimension, there is a need for more relevant information. We propose to build a new typology of orientations and attitudes towards the European integration process that offers a more nuanced perspective and encompasses different ways of orienting the EU beyond the classic distinction of hard and soft Euroscepticism. We investigate the precise nature of variations in orientations towards the EU (principle, polity, policy) in Southern Europe. A decade ago, low levels of Euroscepticism in both partisan and public opinion arenas were exhibited in this region. Our work reveals changes introduced by new challenger parties and the mobilisation of different dimensions of political contestation among the South European public.