The contingency of EU citizenship: European identity and support for populist parties

Abstract

This study explores whether the contingent nature of EU citizenship may explain simultaneous accounts of support for anti-establishment, populist parties and support for the European Union. Though EU citizenship is procedurally well-established, its substantive aspect, which is about citizens’ orientations towards the EU, is uneven across member-states and issue areas. To operationalize this, the analysis differentiates between orientations towards the EU’s internal institutions and orientations towards its foreign-policy. The study utilizes a 2018 Eurobarometer survey, and employs a multi-level regression analysis to the current 27 EU member-states. One key contribution is the identification of the distinct role that the European Union plays as a foreign policy actor in the process of EU (dis)integration. Findings show that a positive EU-image depresses support for populist parties across all member-states, yet support for EU-level foreign policy yields different results among member states. Across EU member-states with longer experience with democracy, preference towards EU foreign policy depress support for populist parties, whereas across EU member-states with shorter experience with democracy this support increases. The assumption of EU citizenship as integrative interacts with the assumption of populism as disintegrative to produce nonlinear paths of EU (dis)integration at multiple levels of the EU.