More or less integration ? Explaining Candidates’ and Citizens’ Attitudes towards European Integration in 2014 Belgium

Defacqz, Samuel [UCL] Dodeigne, Jérémy [UCL] Teuber, Rainer Ferdinand [UCL] Van Ingelgom, Virginie [UCL]

Recently, Rose and Borz underlined the theoretical and empirical need to distinguish between static support as it is now from dynamic support for further integration (2015). From this perspective Europeans can endorse the EU as a good thing today, and at the very same time not endorse further integration. This text builds on this argument in order to offer a renewed interpretation of the gap between elites1 and ordinary citizens. In a multi-method approach, this chapter analyses the determinants of these dynamic attitudes. This paper focuses on the case of Belgium by mobilizing Belgian Candidates Survey and Belgian Voter Survey (PartiRep) 2014. It begins with a qualitative analysis of the open-questions that were present in both surveys (open question following the scale 10 points scale (gone too far – not far enough): “Could you explain why you have chosen this option?”). The aim of the first section is to generate new hypotheses. In particular, this qualitative section concludes to the need to introduce public policy preferences as an additional determinant of candidates and voters attitudes towards European integration as well as the question of EU democracy. Then the rest of the paper mobilizes multinomial logit regressions in order to explain candidates’ and voters’ attitudes towards further European integration, by introducing public policies preferences in the explanation. While candidates are committed to further integration in terms of policy transfer to the European level – in particular regarding social and welfare policies as well as environment and immigration – most Belgian citizens are not.