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This article contributes to the literature on political heuristics by reporting two survey experiments conducted in Spain in 2014–2015 on party and ideology cues regarding preferences on a range of European Union and domestic issues in European and general elections. The findings reveal that party cues increase voters' competence to take positions on European Union issues more than ideological ones. Cues increase competence in a similar fashion regardless of the nature of the topic, although the effect of cues that parties provide on European Union issues seems to be stronger than that of cues on domestic policies. Party cueing effects are also consistent across different electoral arenas (national vs. European), and for all types of parties regardless of their age or positions toward the European Union integration process.

Do integration crises reinforce legal differentiation in European integration? Are differentiated EU policies under stress prone to cascading opt-outs? We argue that integration crises as such are unlikely to cause further fragmentation in already differentiated EU regimes. If the EU decides to adopt new treaties and laws in response to the crises, however, these are likely to reproduce and extend pre-existing patterns of differentiation. Empirically, this study offers within-case counterfactual analyses of differentiation in the Euro and the migration crises. Whereas the Euro crisis triggered a major institutional change in the Eurozone, the member states could not agree on a thorough reform of the asylum system. Correspondingly, we observe excess differentiation in the Euro crisis but stable differentiation in the migration crisis.

Why has the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partisanship met with strong public resistance among some Europeans and in some European Union member states, but not in others? This article argues that one important perspective to explain the pattern of support for TTIP is the role of heuristic opinion formation and issue attention. Analysing multiple waves of Eurobarometer data, I find that views of the two treaty partners, the US and the European Union, shape attitudes towards TTIP and that the largely post-materialist concerns over TTIP resonated specifically in those European countries whose citizens' attention was less focused on economic issues. In showing how opinions towards concrete real-world trade policy proposals are shaped by the political context, these findings complement previous research on citizens' general stances towards trade.

Presents a transcript of an online discussion of various members of the PEEI, the Research Group on the Political Economy of European Integration, a group that was formed in 1991 by the U of California's Center for German & European Studies. The group is a forum for social scientists to share their research on European integration. The social scientists, who have been involved with the PEEI over the last few years, give reasons why it has helped them with their own research & how the PEEI has assisted in developing a more common way of researching & looking at European integration. The social scientists ask questions of each other & point out advances they have made as a group. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd.]