Varieties of Crises, and Crisis Response: A Conjoint Experiment in Six European Countries

How do crises shape citizens’ preferences for European integration? This paper investigates how different types of crises influence citizens’ support for either deeper European integration or re-nationalization of competences. We draw on a large-scale conjoint experiment conducted in May 2025 across six countries—Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, and the United Kingdom. Respondents are presented with hypothetical crisis scenarios that vary along six key dimensions: (1) the type and policy field of the crisis (economic, health, security, or natural disaster); (2) cross- border scope (whether some or all EU member states are affected); (3) EU responsibility (whether and to what extent the EU bears responsibility for the crisis); (4) national government responsibility (whether and to what extent national governments bear responsibility); (5) severity and duration (the duration & intensity of the crisis in the absence of intervention); and (6) domestic exposure (whether the respondent’s own country is directly affected). This design allows us to estimate the causal effect of specific crisis attributes on preferences for supranational versus national responses on two main dependent variables: we ask under which crisis scenario respondents would be more willing to delegate powers to the EU, and then we ask, for each crisis scenario, to what extent respondents would like to delegate powers to the EU or rather bring them back to their nation states. Our preliminary results show that the type of crisis, its intensity, and its degree of symmetry and domestic exposure play a critical role in determining whether respondents are willing to delegate powers to the EU, while the attribution of blame to the EU or national authorities is secondary.