Euroscepticism in the EU15: An individual-level analysis of Instrumental and Policy-specific Euroscepticism

European Integration has been pushed forward in the last 20 years, even in the face of falling public support for the Union as a whole. The falling support has recently manifested itself in the 2014 European Parliament Elections, where a large number of the MEPs were elected on the basis of anti-EU campaigning. In my thesis I attempt to reach a better understanding of the reasons behind opposition to the EU, or Euroscepticism. Much of the research on support for, or opposition to, European Integration has focused on general membership support. I build my work on this, but in stead of looking into such support alone, I try to find out to what extent the factors which determine membership support also explain support for European-level decision-making within various policy-areas. Even amongst supporters of their respective country's EU membership there can be found large variation in which kinds of policy they feel the EU and the National governments should be in charge of. To answer my research question I use data from the Eurobarometer 71.3 which was conducted in 2009, just after the previous European Parliament elections. The analyses rely on the theoretical framework of David Easton, distinguishing between diffuse and specific support. In order to be able to compare the degree to which the various factors explain the different dimensions of Euroscepticism I use Ordinary Least Squares regression, allowing for causal analysis and comparisons of the explained variance between models. Furthermore, I organise the different factors which have been used to explain general membership support into utilitarian explanations, cultural explanations and political, or institutional, explanations, before I test these on approaches both on general membership support - in this thesis named Instrumental Euroscepticism - and policy-specific support. The latter is further divided into two dimensions: Political Euroscepticism; tapping into attitudes concerning policy-areas in which European integration has already come quite far, and Socio-Economic Euroscepticism; tapping into attitudes towards policy-areas which have been kept more or less under national jurisdiction. My analyses show that utilitarian explanations, which are crucial in determining general membership support, are somewhat less relevant when it comes to the two policy-specific dimensions, whereas the cultural explanations are central to all three dimensions of Euroscepticism. Lastly, the political approach is found to be more relevant for Instrumental and Socio-Economic Euroscepticism than for Political Euroscepticism