ImagEU - Exploring People's Images of the EU

Our project explores the mental images EU citizens associated with the European Union, deepening our understanding of public perceptions amid growing political polarization and Euroscepticism. Prior studies have largely relied on deductive approaches, reducing peoples’ images mostly to valence, i.e., positive/negative images. Based on the current literature, it is, therefore, difficult to evaluate what and how people think about the EU and what images they have of it. A more comprehensive understanding of EU images would, however, allow a more nuanced understanding of what the EU means to citizens: This is, according to the few related studies available (e.g., Van den Hoogen et al., 2022), not as clear-cut as an evaluation of a simple valence measurement would suggest. Going beyond the current state of the EU literature, we draw on a comprehensive, bottom-up approach to take stock of people’s images and connect them to the existing literature. We proceed in two steps: (1) We analyse open questions in a representative survey with the Dutch population, fielded in December 2025, to identify image clusters. We connect those to the literature, based on standard items on EU images and EU membership. (2) In a second step, we explore EU images further in a larger survey in which participants will be asked to repeatedly rate image pairs of the EU, selected based on the image clusters identified in step 1. Together, these methods aim to uncover richer insights into public perceptions of the EU and their broader implications for the EU and the academic debate on it.