What Do You Hear, What Do You Say? A Vignette Experiment on Competing Framings of EU Membership and Individual Attachment to the EU

This paper analyses which political messages galvanise or erode individual attachment to the EU among European publics. Postfunctionalist arguments emphasizing a constraining dissensus on European integration, rooted in the conflict between exclusive national identity and supranational integration, still populate the core of contemporary scholarly debate on political attitudes towards the EU. However, evidence suggests that integration remained untempered, for instance with the expansion of EMU and fiscal solidarity policy portfolios; likewise, diffuse political support for the EU among publics, which was already significantly high and in an increasing trajectory since the Great Recession, accelerated even further in the aftermath of the COVID-19 and Ukraine crises. This should elicit a revisitation of extant accounts concerning which kind of political messages drive individual attitudes towards the EU. As the EU is often regarded as distant and complex, political communication emphasizing implications of EU membership – vehiculated in domestic political debates by politicians and the media - are paramount cues Europeans take to formulate their attachment to the EU. To appraise this, I conducted a vignette experiment embedded in a large-N survey dataset collected in 2022 across 16 EU countries, where I measure variation in individual EU attachment as an effect of frames highlighting either positive or negative implications from EU membership to the national economy, culture and security. I find that while frames depicting advantages from EU membership (e.g. economic prosperity, cultural diversity and increased national security) do generate a positive effect in average levels of EU attachment, frames highlighting negative consequences of EU membership do not generate a correspondingly negative effect. Hence, domestic political communication headlining advantages from EU policy may promote the consolidation of attachment to the EU, while the room for populist activation of anti-EU opposition by framing it in a negative light is more limited than initially anticipated.