Abstract
The sweeping victories of Euroskeptic and far right parties in the 2014 European Parliament elections reflect public discontent with the European Union that has been growing since the beginning of the great recession. Using data from Eurobarometer 71.3 (Summer 2009), which were collected soon after the onset of the economic crisis, we test a conditional hypothesis derived from a combination of utilitarian theories of political support and social-identity theory. Specifically, we examine the extent to which the effects of individuals’ economic perceptions on their support for the EU are conditioned by the way they conceive of their national and EU identities. The analysis reveals that sociotropic rather than egocentric economic evaluations tend to drive EU support among people with stronger attachments to the nation.
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This wave of the Eurobarometer is the only one with the particular constellation of survey items that we need to test our hypotheses.
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This scale’s Chronbach’s alpha, at 0.776, is quite respectable.
The original battery yielded so little variation on the attachment to the nation item that the battery does not allow researchers to distinguish between ardent nationalists and those who are patriotic, but less nationalistic. Our relational measure of identity gauges the extent to which individuals’ attachment to the nation is exclusive.
Our relational measure of identity does not allow us to distinguish between those with equally weak attachment to both entities and those with equally strong attachments to them. However, there is little variation in the absolute levels of attachment. Over 70 percent of those with equal levels of attachment professed they felt both European and national “to a great extent,” and roughly 25 percent felt both European and national “somewhat.” Fewer than 5 percent of respondents felt little or no attachment to either entity.
Adrian Favell, Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating Europe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008).
Although the data are hierarchical in nature, with individuals nested within countries, we estimate the models using OLS regression with cluster-robust standard errors, rather than a multilevel modeling approach. Our approach requires fewer assumptions and is unbiased as long as no cross-level interactions are included in the model.
We also ran the model with controls for inflation rate and GDP growth, but found that neither was statistically significant and that their omission did not affect the other estimates. We therefore chose to present the more parsimonious model.
We should not be surprised at the size of this effect because the measure embeds attachment to the EU, which is closely related to the dependent variable.
Anderson, “When in Doubt, Use Proxies”; Lauren McLaren, “Explaining Mass-Level Euroscepticism: Identity, Interests, and Institutional Distrust,” Acta Politica 42 (July 2007): 233–51.
We also tested a variety of individual-level controls that we trimmed from the final model. They included immigration status, parental immigration status, and political ideology.
Wald tests comparing Models 1 and 3 and Models 2 and 4 returned highly statistically significant F-statistics of 38.7 (df: 2,23) and 49.7 (df: 2,11), respectively.
Thomas Brambor, William Roberts Clark, and Matt Golder, “Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses,” Political Analysis 14 (May 2005): 63–82.
Because few respondents expressed a stronger attachment to the EU than to the nation, the estimated effects at the EU-oriented end of the scale should be interpreted cautiously. It is possible that the observed results are an artifact of the linear model.
The median sociotropic economic evaluation is 0.25, while the median egocentric economic evaluation is 0.75.
When sociotropic economic evaluation is set at 1 and egocentric economic evaluation is set at 0, the effect of identity orientation on EU support is no longer statistically significant. However, there are only 30 individuals who have strong positive evaluations of the national and negative evaluations of their household finances.
Andrea Schlenker-Fischer, “Multiple Identities and Attitudes Towards Cultural Diversity in Europe: A Conceptual and Empirical Analysis” in Cultural Diversity, ed. Fuchs and Klingemann, 110.
For reviews see Leif Lewin, Self Interest and Public Interest in Western Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); D. Roderick Kiewiet and Michael S. Lewis-Beck, “No Man Is an Island: Self-Interest, the Public Interest, and Sociotropic Voting,” Critical Review 23 (2011): 303–319; Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Mary Stegmaier, “Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes,” Political Science 3 (2000): 183–219.
Gerald H. Kramer, “Short-Term Fluctuations in US Voting Behavior, 1896–1964,” American Political Science Review 65 (1971): 131–43.
Donald R. Kinder and D. Roderick Kiewiet, “Sociotropic Politics: the American Case,” British Journal of Political Science 11 (1981): 129–61.
Gerald H. Kramer, “The Ecological Fallacy Revisited: Aggregate-Versus Individual-Level Findings on Economics and Elections, and Sociotropic Voting,” American Political Science Review 77 (1983): 92–111; Douglas A. Hibbs, “Solidarity or Egoism?” (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1993).
Geoffrey Evans and Robert Andersen, “The Political Conditioning of Economic Perceptions,” Journal of Politics 68 (2006): 194–207.
Kiewiet and Lewis-Beck, “No Man Is an Island,” 315.
Fuchs and Klingemann, Cultural Diversity; Fritz Scharpf, Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
David Easton, “A Re-Assessment of the Concept of Political Support,” British Journal of Political Science 5 (1975): 435–57.
Kiewiet and Lewis-Beck, “No Man Is an Island.”
There might also be downsides to the timing of the survey, as the almost universal acknowledgement of poor economic conditions might affect the results. It is likely that this reduced variation in economic views reduces the power of hypothesis tests of the effects of sociotropic economic evaluations on EU support. It is unclear, however, what effect, if any, the nearly universal acknowledgement of poor economic conditions has on the conditioning effect of identity. Further studies should investigate whether our results hold during periods with a greater range of sociotropic economic evaluations.
Lewin, Self Interest and Public Interest.
Kinder and Kiewiet, “Sociotropic Politics”; Kiewiet and Lewis-Beck, “No Man Is an Island.”
Kramer, “The Ecological Fallacy Revisited.”
Hooghe and Marks, “Calculation, Community and Cues.”
Garry and Tilley, “The Macroeconomic Factors.”
de Vries and Van Kersbergen, “Interests, Identity and Political Allegiance.”
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The authors wish to thank Ben Bowyer, Liesbet Hooghe, John Sides, Boyka Stefanova, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Polity for their helpful suggestions and comments.
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Levy, N., Phan, B. The Utility of Identity: Explaining Support for the EU after the Crash. Polity 46, 562–590 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.19