The relationship between national identity and European Union evaluations, 1993–2017
| Author | Robert Rohrschneider,Nicholas J Clark |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116519840428 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
European Union Politics
The relationship between
2019, Vol. 20(3) 384–405
! The Author(s) 2019
national identity and
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116519840428
European Union
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evaluations, 1993–2017
Nicholas J Clark
Department of Political Science, Susquehanna University,
Selinsgrove, PA, USA
Robert Rohrschneider
Department of Political Science, The University of Kansas,
Lawrence, KS, USA
Abstract
We examine two aspects of the connection between individuals’ national identities and
their European Union evaluations. First, we examine the changing relationship from
1993–2017, thus paying attention to not only recent crises years but also the time when
political integration accelerated after the Maastricht treaty came into effect. Second, we
draw on group-identity theory to explain the changing relationship for individuals with
extreme as well as moderate ideological attitudes. We use a new cumulative
Eurobarometer Representation dataset (1993–2017) to test three hypotheses. Our
most important finding is that by 2017 the relationship between national identity and
European Union evaluations among ideologically moderate citizens is stronger than it
was in 1993 among individuals with right-extreme ideological views. While the economic
crisis since 2007 reinforced this development, it was not responsible for its onset.
Keywords
European integration, national identity, public opinion
Corresponding author:
Robert Rohrschneider, Department of Political Science, The University of Kansas, 1541 Lilac Lane, 504 Blake
Hall, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA.
Email: roro@ku.edu
Clark and Rohrschneider
385
To what extent has the association between individuals’ national identities and
their negative evaluations of the European Union (EU) become stronger between
the 1990s and the present (i.e. from 1993–2017)? While the relationship between
these orientations has been documented in a number of persuasive studies (Carey,
2002; Hooghe and Marks, 2005; Kritzinger, 2003), this article suggests that our
knowledge about the changing connection between them should be developed fur-
ther, for at least two reasons. First, recent dynamic studies mostly focus on the
years bracketing the economic crisis that began to unfold around 2007 (Foster and
Frieden, 2017; Fligstein et al., 2012). While extremely valuable, we also expect that
EU-related controversies that arose before the recent crises—over national sover-
eignty, the introduction of the Euro, Eastern Enlargement, or the EU constitu-
tion—likely fortified the connection between these orientations from 1993 onwards
(Eichenberg and Dalton, 2007; Hooghe and Marks, 2009; Steenbergen et al., 2007).
Accordingly, ours is one of the few studies to examine the relationship between
national identity and EU evaluations from 1993 until 2017.
Second, it is important to determine whether national identities matter more for
individuals with more extreme ideological orientations (i.e. those on the extreme
left and especially the extreme right) who have historically been critical of the EU
for different reasons (De Vries and Edwards, 2009; Van Elsas et al., 2016).
Alternatively, if national identities have also become a stronger basis of EU eval-
uations for citizens with ideologically moderate views, this suggests a potentially
larger crisis of confidence in the EU. Ideologically moderate citizens comprise the
largest segment of mass publics (see below) and have historically provided the
bulwark of support for the EU (Marks et al., 2002; Van Elsas and Van Der
Brug, 2015). We therefore examine the connection between national identity and
EU evaluations separately for major ideological groups over time.
We address these issues using a newly assembled, longitudinal Eurobarometer
Representation Dataset (ERD, 1993–2017) that includes several measures of
regime evaluation, ideological self-placements, and a slew of important control
variables assessed over time in the Eurobarometer surveys.
The most important result is that the relationship between national identity and
EU evaluations is about as strong among ideologically moderate citizens in 2017 as
it was in the early 1990s among individuals with ideologically extreme-right views.
The findings further suggest that the relationship between national identities and
popular EU evaluations began to strengthen before the crises unfolded in 2007,
suggesting that events prior to the crisis years also began to increase the salience of
national identities to European publics, although we also demonstrate that the
connection intensified after the economic crises.
The findings point to several implications. First, because citizens’ negative EU
evaluations have become increasingly anchored in their national identities (Foster
and Frieden, 2017; Fligstein et al., 2012), negative judgments about the EU’s per-
formance have become more resilient and therefore exacerbate the difficulties for
policy makers to improve the EU’s reputation among mass publics. Second,
because our findings indicate that the relationship1 between identity and EU
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European Union Politics 20(3)
evaluations has become stronger for individuals with moderate as well as extreme
ideological orientations, criticisms of the EU articulated by extreme right and left
parties may resonate increasingly with citizens in the ideological center. Third, as
we make clear below, the fact that national identities and EU evaluations became
more strongly connected over time helps explain why aggregate EU evaluations
became more negative since 2007 even though levels of nationalism have largely
remained stable (Fligstein et al., 2012; Foster and Frieden, 2017).
From a theoretical perspective, the strengthening relationship between national
identities and EU evaluations across left-right groups illustrates how cross-
national tensions over integration-related issues can activate group conflict
mechanisms that then increase the importance of national identities when publics
evaluate the EU (Curtis, 2014; Huddy, 2004). Of course, as we will make plain
below, there is more to the story than group conflict or social identity.
Nevertheless, the conditions created by the recent crises and by controversies
over political integration doubtlessly helped magnify the salience of national iden-
tities across ideological groups, just as social identity theory would lead us to
expect (Brewer, 2001; Curtis, 2014; Huddy, 2013).
Public evaluations of the EU
The financial and migrant crises since 2007 have taken a heavy toll on public
evaluations of the EU. Especially in EU debtor countries, evaluations of the EU
have declined dramatically (Armingeon and Ceka, 2014; Roth et al., 2013; see also
Figure 1). This assessment is especially compelling because prior studies use var-
ious indicators that focus on performance evaluations of the EU and gauge pub-
lics’ general system support for the EU. Importantly, regardless of which indicator
is used, studies point to a decline in EU support. For example, scholars frequently
employ an indicator of “trust in the EU”, which comes close to measuring “the
ideal type of an affective system of support” (Armingeon and Ceka, 2014: 88; see
also Anderson and Hecht, 2018; Foster and Frieden, 2017; Roth et al., 2013). In
turn, other studies use an indicator measuring public satisfaction with the way the
EU democracy works (De Vries, 2018; Hobolt, 2012; Karp and Banducci, 2003).
This EU-democracy satisfaction indicator gauges individual judgments about how
well the EU delivers what citizens want, both in terms of policies (e.g. economic
goods) and procedures (e.g. good governance) (Hobolt and De Vries, 2016)—in
short, the performance of the EU. Together, the two indicators capture a range of
different aspects of EU evaluations, including short-term performance and longer-
term, diffuse confidence in the EU (for a similar interpretation, see Van Elsas et al.,
2016; Verhaegen et al., 2017).
However, while the cumulative evidence reveals a significant decline in popular
evaluations of the EU since 2007 for both types of indicators, none of the available
measures gauges support for the ideals of integration itself. In other words, they
capture popular views about the current EU but do not capture individuals’ long-
term visions about the preferred endpoint of European integration, or the best way
Clark and Rohrschneider
387
Figure 1. Country mean scores of respondents’ satisfaction with EU democracy (top figure) and
trust in EU institutions (bottom figure), by year countries joined the EU.
Note: Entries are country mean scores and quadratic fit lines. SWEU: satisfaction with
European Union.
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European Union Politics 20(3)
to achieve it (Wessels, 2007). Because of the availability of indicators (see below),
this article will examine individual trust in the EU as well as EU performance
evaluations, but it does not analyze individuals’ integration ideals.
National identity, ideological self-placement, and public
evaluations of the EU
How does individual national identity relate to EU evaluations over time? Prior
research establishes that individual national identity leads to more negative EU
evaluations (Carey, 2002; Christin and Trechsel, 2002; Hooghe and Marks, 2005;
Kritzinger, 2003; McLaren, 2002). While this relationship clearly holds in most
cross-sectional studies, over-time analyses conducted since the onset of the eco-
nomic crisis continue to debate the precise importance of national identity for EU
evaluations. One recent study...
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