Attitudes towards the European Union: A Return to Indifference?

Reykjavík.
The final paper in this ECPR 2011 session is Virginie van Ingelgom, who returns us to the question of European legitimacy. There are two dimensions to this: internal (perceived by European citizens) and external (objectively legitimated by international law). The former is problematic: European integration has been found to have low salience for European citizens when examined using qualitative data, but quantitative methods may provide better insights.

Such analysis usually shows that levels of support for the EU has fallen since the Maastricht treaty in the early 90s, after stronger support during the 80s – but another perspective on this is that support has simply returned to 1970s levels. (We now go into a period of stats-and-numbers overload. Ugh. Explain, don’t just show.)

What comes out of all of this appears to be that we’ve simply seen a shift from stronger support towards a more neutral attitude – but not to outright Euroscepticism. This may indicate that amongst elites, there is a growing polarisation of opinions; and that indifference and/or ambivalence is growing amongst ‘ordinary’ citizens. Such indifference is not necessarily bad in itself – but can lead to greater political unpredictability.