Suchergebnisse

Does European state building go hand in hand with European nation building? This article engages with the scholarly debate on the dynamic relationship between the construction of supranational political institutions that exert key functions of sovereignty and collective identities by investigating the extent to which the adoption of the Euro as a currency is associated with a decrease in the share of Europeans who identify exclusively with their nation and not with the European Union. In detail, by using a dynamic panel-data model on 26 European Union countries in the post-Maastricht period (1996–2017), our results show that the Euro has fostered European identity, leading to a small but significant decrease (-3%) in the share of Europeans with exclusive national identity.

What is the scope for autonomous action of the European Commission? Its independence is much more contentious than that of the European Court of Justice, which is generally considered quite autonomous. While the literature on the Commission focuses predominantly on its ability to use its agenda-setting powers, the Commission's other means to influence European integration have been less well established. In this paper, I demonstrate how the Commission can use its role as a guardian of the Treaty to coax the Council of Ministers into action. In addition to agenda setting, the Commission can manipulate the Council's default condition, or change the preferences of some of its member states. Thereby the Commission may achieve decisions from the Council that would not have come about had the Commission only agenda-setting powers at its disposal. Effectively, the Commission here uses the greater autonomy of the European Court strategically for its own ends.

One of the major findings of the literature on Euroscepticism is that support for European integration generally declines as one moves closer to the extremes of the left-right ideological spectrum. However, in multidimensional policy space, Euroscepticism varies in more complex ways. This article explores the relief of Euroscepticism for citizens in four European states – the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France – based on data from voting advice applications fielded before the 2019 elections of the European Parliament. The results reveal that the way Euroscepticism maps onto other dimensions differs significantly for citizens and for parties and across political contexts. Such variation is important for understanding how preferences for European integration are embedded into existing structures of political competition.

Scholarly research investigating the determinants of support for European integration at the individual level is abundant, but the analysis of aggregate-level indicators is relatively less developed. This study examines the collective responses of the Europeans to different environments of integration by using a multiple interrupted time series design with panel data. The results suggest that the context of integration after important treaties changes the aggregate support for integration significantly. More importantly, the analysis provides evidence challenging some findings of earlier studies with regard to the impact of aggregate-level indicators of support for integration.

Utilitarian theories propose that support for the EU is based on an instrumental calculus about the costs and benefits of European integration. Drawing on these theories, we analyze whether and how ads produced by European institutions affect public support for the EU. Our findings, based on a panel survey experiment, indicate that these ads increase support for the EU, and that ads emphasizing the policy benefits of European integration are more effective than ads emphasizing its reduced costs. However, these positive effects are short-lived, since they had disappeared one year after citizens were initially exposed to the ads. In a context of increasing negativity towards the EU, these findings, based on realistic treatments, have relevant theoretical and policy implications.