Do Populist Attitudes Predict Euroscepticism? Evidence from 31 participating countries in the tenth round of the European Social Survey

The notion that populism and Euroscepticism go hand in hand among citizens seems intuitive, yet it has seldom been subject to large-scale cross-national empirical scrutiny. This paper employs data from the tenth round of the European Social Survey to examine whether (and under what conditions) populist attitudes predict Euroscepticism across 31 countries and more than 45,000 citizens. We estimate a series of multilevel regression models, incorporating both populist attitudes and the established demand-side explanations of Euroscepticism: utilitarian cost–benefit calculations, national identity and immigration concerns, and political-institutional factors. We find that populist attitudes are a statistically significant but substantively modest predictor of Euroscepticism, far eclipsed by immigration attitudes and economic grievances. We find no evidence that political ideology conditions the populism–Euroscepticism link. Our central finding, however, is that the relationship is contingent on governance quality: in countries with perceived low government effectiveness, populist attitudes actually suppress Euroscepticism, consistent with a substitute logic whereby the EU is viewed as a corrective to domestic institutional failure. On the other hand, in countries perceived as well-governed, populist grievances spill over onto the EU as an additional elite-level target. These findings complicate the assumption that populism and Euroscepticism are natural ‘allies’, suggesting instead that their relationship is conditional on the institutional context in which citizens form their political attitudes.