Fairy Tale or Trojan Horse: Candidates and voters’ preferences for a more or less (differentiated) integration

Following the current debate (and political propositions) about the opportunity to push forward a differentiated integration, this paper addresses the mass-elites (in)congruence in terms of preferences regarding European integration and in particular policy-making preferences. We propose in this paper to address the mass-elites gap by investigate how EU integration is perceived by political elites and citizens in times of crisis. Adopting a qualitative approach, this paper analyses candidates and voters preferences towards European integration (the Belgian Candidate Survey and Belgian Voter Survey 2014). Based on the qualitative analysis of an open question on EU integration, the paper concludes to the need to introduce public policy preferences as an additional determinant of candidates’ and voters’ attitudes towards European integration in particular in a context where the future of differentiated integration is largely debated. Our results show that while Belgian elites are committed to further integration in terms of policy transfer to the European level most Belgian citizens are not because of the negative policy effects this could generate