Political Ideology, Policy Attitudes and Public Support for European Integration

How does public support for European integration relate to the broader political views of European citizens? This article maps in a comprehensive way the relationships between support for European integration, left-right ideological positions and policy attitudes towards redistribution, immigration and gay rights. We introduce the use of flexible non-parametric methods (generalized additive models) and more appropriate measures of dependence (the distance correlation coefficient) to explore and measure the strength and forms of these relationships across time (2004-2020), countries and indicators of European integration support. We find that the link between public support for European integration and left-right ideology is weak. The exact form of the relationship depends on the operationalization of European integration support, the country and the time period, but it rarely resembles the classic inverted-U curve suggested by existing literature and studies of party positions. In fact, average EU support is typically highest at the moderate left rather than at the center. The relationship of support for further European integration with immigration attitudes is much stronger, stable, consistent and almost linear; with support for gay rights it is also linear but considerably weaker; with support for redistribution there is practically no relationship at all. While public opinion is much less structured and less extreme than party positions, there is some evidence that – across countries – the strength of the links between EU support, left-right and policy positions at the party level is associated with the strength of these links at the level of the public. Furthermore, over time the strength of the link of public EU support with different policy attitudes covaries systematically with the salience (media presence) of the issue at the EU level.