Resistance towards the European Union in mutiple dimensions : A statistical study of which values that drives EU-sceptical opinion in Europe

The purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent skeptical attitudes towards the European Union is driven by materialistic-, postmaterialist values and populism in different parts of Europe. To achieve this aim, the study is based on multivariate regression analysis with data utilized from the European Social survey 2014. The findings show that cultural questions associated with TAN values, such as a nationalistic resistance towards immigration, have the best ability to predict EU-skepticism over economic questions related with a subjective placement on the political left-right scale, or populism associated with a lack of trust in the state of political governance. These findings suggest that the subjective left-right scale do not structure attitudes toward the European Union to a great extent. Instead, the results of this study are in line with scholars that argue that the TAN-GAL scale as well as populism have grown in importance, as these axes of competition are both more linked with opinions on EU. These results hold for all regions in Europe that are examined in this study, although particular strong effects are found in Germany, where populism and TAN values shape attitudes towards EU to the greatest extent