Elite-Led European Integration or Asymmetric Representation? The Double-Sided Mass–Elite Gap in the EU (1979 – 2025)

The emergence of constraining dissensus has profoundly altered the politics of European integration, reinforcing scholarly attention to the growing distance between political elites and citizens on EU-related issues. While a substantial literature has examined mass–elite congruence in the European Union, much of this research focuses on single countries, limited time spans, or one-sided measures of elite–voter disagreement. Additionally, recent comparative evidence has begun to identify a double-sided mass–elite gap within a limited subset of member states (EU-9), whereby elites from pro-European parties are more supportive of European integration than their voters, while the reverse holds for Eurosceptic parties. Whether this configuration represents a broader structural feature of EU politics, however, remains an open question. This article addresses this gap by providing a systematic longitudinal analysis of mass–elite congruence on European integration across all EU Member States between 1979 and 2025. Drawing on data from nine harmonised mass and elite surveys, the study employs multilevel modelling to assess the relationship between party elites’ positions and the attitudes of their electorates. This design captures cross-national and temporal variation while accounting for the hierarchical structure of voters nested within parties, countries, and survey waves. The results demonstrate that the double-sided mass–elite gap is a generalised feature of EU politics rather than a phenomenon confined to a small group of countries. Elites affiliated with pro-European parties consistently express higher levels of support for European integration than their voters, whereas supporters of Eurosceptic parties tend to hold more critical views than the elites who represent them. This asymmetric pattern indicates that mass–elite incongruence is not simply the result of elites uniformly leading public opinion, instead reflecting systematically different representational dynamics across the different EU party systems. Although the magnitude of the gap varies across countries and over time, its double-sided structure proves remarkably persistent.