The European Union’s impact on welfare state attitudes 1 THE EUROPEAN UNION’S IMPACT ON WELFARE STATE ATTITUDES: A LONGITUDINAL AND MULTILEVEL INVESTIGATION

The European Union’s impact on welfare state attitudes 2 This study extends earlier research efforts investigating the impact of the European Union (EU) by examining to what extent welfare attitudes have converged and, if so, whether the economic dimension of European integration can explain this. Two waves from the European and World Values Study (EVS/WVS) are combined with UNCTAD data about EU trade, creating a dataset with 67,346 citizens living in 24 EU countries enabling both a longitudinal and international comparison. The data are first analyzed at the national level, using aggregated individual welfare state attitudes, to describe patterns through time. The first part of the analysis indicates that welfare state attitudes have converged and the multilevel analysis applied in the second part confirms that this is due to the process of European integration