Calculation, Community and Cues
| Author | Gary Marks,Liesbet Hooghe |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116505057816 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Calculation, Community and
Cues
Public Opinion on European Integration
Liesbet Hooghe
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, Nethlands
Gary Marks
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, Netherlands
ABSTRACT
This article summarizes and extends the main lines of theo-
rizing on public opinion on European integration. We test
theories of economic calculus and communal identity in a
multi-level analysis of Eurobarometer data. Both economic
calculus and communal identity are influential, but the latter
is stronger than the former. We theorize how the political
consequences of identity are contested and shaped – that is
to say, politically cued – in national contexts. The more
national elites are divided, the more citizens are cued to
oppose European integration, and this effect is particularly
pronounced among citizens who see themselves as exclus-
ively national. A model that synthesizes economic, identity,
and cue theory explains around one-quarter of variation at
the individual level and the bulk of variation at the national
and party levels.
419
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116505057816
Volume 6 (4): 419–443
Copyright© 2005
SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA,
New Delhi
KEY WORDS
cueing
European integration
identity
political economy
public opinion
What drives citizens to support or oppose European integration? The
question is as old as the European Union, and it has been the subject of some
one hundred articles, yet there is no scholarly consensus on the answer. There
are three main families of explanation. Most research on the topic builds on
trade theory to conceptualize a calculus of economic costs and benefits. The
presumption is that citizens evaluate the economic consequences of European
integration for themselves and for the groups of which they are part, and that
such consequences motivate their attitudes. An alternative line of explanation
draws on the psychology of group membership to examine how social iden-
tities, including, above all, national identities, constrain support for European
integration. These two families of theorizing have often been pitted against
one another as mutually exclusive conceptualizations. But a new line of
research, drawing on cognitive and social psychology, challenges this
either/or thinking by examining how political cues – grounded in ideology
or in elite communication – mediate the effect of economic calculation and
community membership.
These approaches conceive the European Union in contrasting ways.
Economic theories view the EU as a regime that facilitates economic exchange,
with profound distributional consequences for individuals arising from
differences in asset mobility and for countries arising from varieties of capi-
talism. Social identity theory conceives of the European Union as a polity
overarching established territorial communities, and considers how public
opinion is constrained by citizens’ conceptions of their identities. Cue theory
regards the European Union as an extension of domestic politics, and infers
that public attitudes are therefore guided by domestic ideology and domestic
political organizations.
This article has three purposes. First, we take stock of the field to convey
the current state of knowledge and, hence, our point of departure. The study
of public opinion on European integration is fast-moving, and it is useful to
compare the explanations that are now on the table. Our second purpose is
to evaluate the relative causal power of the two most compelling explanations
– economic theory and identity theory – in a way that proponents of each
would find reasonable. In earlier work we find that both theories bite, but
that identity appears the more powerful influence (Hooghe and Marks, 2004).
Our third purpose is to build on this analysis to theorize how economic calcu-
lation and identity are cued by elites. Given that the European Union is rarely
foremost in citizens’ minds, we need to understand how interests and identity
come to bear on European integration. The resulting model explains slightly
more than one-quarter of the variance at the individual level and the bulk of
variance at the country and party levels.
European Union Politics 6(4)
420
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