Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

What kind of EU do citizens want? Reform preferences and the conflict over Europe

What kind of EU do citizens want? Reform preferences and the conflict over Europe How to reform the EU in times of fundamental conflict over the future of European integration? Although Europe’s future is fiercely debated, we still know little about what kind of EU citizens want and how their reform preferences relate to the emerging transnational cleavage. We argue that there are two kinds of reform trajectories. First, any changes that touch upon the vertical and horizontal balance of power should be highly contested, as people’s EU reform preferences depend on their position in the conflict between Eurosceptics and Europhiles. Second, reforms that do not activate this fundamental conflict, such as reshaping the EU’s input, output, and throughput legitimacy dimensions, should be favored by citizens across the board. Analyzing original data from conjoint survey experiments with 12,000 respondents in six EU member states largely corroborates our arguments. These findings carry important implications for the political debate about reforming the EU. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of European Public Policy Taylor & Francis

What kind of EU do citizens want? Reform preferences and the conflict over Europe

Download PDF
24 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/taylor-francis/what-kind-of-eu-do-citizens-want-reform-preferences-and-the-conflict-fiUeg6hUpw

References (75)

Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
ISSN
1466-4429
eISSN
1350-1763
DOI
10.1080/13501763.2022.2102670
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

How to reform the EU in times of fundamental conflict over the future of European integration? Although Europe’s future is fiercely debated, we still know little about what kind of EU citizens want and how their reform preferences relate to the emerging transnational cleavage. We argue that there are two kinds of reform trajectories. First, any changes that touch upon the vertical and horizontal balance of power should be highly contested, as people’s EU reform preferences depend on their position in the conflict between Eurosceptics and Europhiles. Second, reforms that do not activate this fundamental conflict, such as reshaping the EU’s input, output, and throughput legitimacy dimensions, should be favored by citizens across the board. Analyzing original data from conjoint survey experiments with 12,000 respondents in six EU member states largely corroborates our arguments. These findings carry important implications for the political debate about reforming the EU.

Journal

Journal of European Public Policy – Taylor & Francis

Published: Sep 2, 2023

Keywords: Conjoint analysis; EU attitudes; euroscepticism; future of European integration; institutional reform; survey experiments

There are no references for this article.