How Trust in Political Institutions Informs Italian Citizens’ Attitudes towards the EU

The next session at the I-POLHYS 2024 symposium starts with Giuliano Bobba, whose focus is on Italian citizens’s attitudes towards the EU during the COVID-19 crisis. There has been a growing recognition of the importance and roles of European institutions, and their activities are entwined and sometimes conflict with the political agendas of national governments; this produces a dynamic of politicisation.

Determinants of support for the EU include a cost-benefit evaluation, economic and cultural dimensions, and party cues, and such questions are further heightened at times of crisis. Immediate utilitarian considerations focus on what benefits citizens receive from the EU, and can manifest in direct or more diffuse support for the EU; additionally, there are more cosmopolitan and post-materialist perspectives related to the idea of Europe; and – especially in the absence of more sophisticated understandings of what the EU is – perspectives influenced by the attitudes and rhetoric of the political parties that individual citizens support. More recently, a multilevel governance perspective has also emerged, supporting the EU as a transnational initiative that is capable of resolving substantial challenges that cannot be addressed effectively only at the national level.

At times of crisis, at the national level there is often a ‘rally around the flag’ effect, where political animosities are put aside for the moment. This does not necessarily extend to the EU level: in fact, higher trust in national institutions may result in lower trust in the EU, and lower trust in national institutions may produce higher trust in the EU. The present study tested these assumptions through a representative three-wave panel survey of some 1,600 to 2,200 Italian citizens in 2020, 2021, and 2023.

Views about Italy’s EU membership moved from 51% positive to 57% and back to 51% over the three waves of the survey, for instance; this is likely to have been driven by a growth in concerns in 2021 about the COVID-19 pandemic, as EU institutions were seen as competent crisis managers. These concerns are no longer as strong in 2023; other crises (the war in Ukraine, climate change, energy security) become more prominent but no longer instil as much confidence in the EU.

These patterns also link to trust in institutions: higher trust in national institutions also produces greater support for the EU, so there is a synergy between national- and European-level trust in institutions. But the specific temporal context of these studies is also exceptional for its combination of crises, of course – more work is necessary here to establish these patterns for the longer term, and comparative work with other countries would also be valuable.