Who counts as European? A Conjoint Experiment on Competing Conceptions of Europeanness

Who counts as European? While extensive research examines whether citizens identify as European, we know surprisingly little about the boundaries of European identity, the criteria EU citizens use to define group membership. This gap matters because the content of identity shapes not only who feels included in the community but also political attitudes toward migration, integration, and EU enlargement. European identity faces intensifying politicization and contestation, with competing visions actively reshaping how citizens understand who belongs. The EU's inclusive "United in diversity" ideal now confronts far-right civilizationist discourse that emphasizes whiteness and Christianity as defining features of Europeanness. Most research assumes citizens embrace either civic or ethnocultural definitions of European identity. However, this binary framework increasingly appears insufficient as most people combine elements from both dimensions, and the framework cannot explain how citizens evaluate the specific attribute combinations they encounter in political debate and everyday life. We move beyond the civic/ethnic dichotomy to investigate which combinations of identity markers Europeans use to define group boundaries. Using conjoint experiments with a click-to-reveal design, we examine how Europeans evaluate hypothetical individuals across nine attributes, including birthplace, family background, language, place of residence, religion, legal status, democratic values, European feeling, and employment status. Respondents must actively select which attributes to reveal before making judgments, but can only reveal a limited number. This constraint forces them to make trade-offs about which information they truly find important for determining whom they perceive as European. We also track how revealed attributes shape subsequent information-seeking. This design allows us to capture both the cognitive processes underlying boundary-making and the characteristics that ultimately inform the decision to accept someone as a European.