Abstract
What leads citizens and political parties to oppose the principles, institutions, or policies of the European Union? This double special issue brings together specialists on public opinion, political parties, and media to answer this question. We examine economic interest and identity as sources of Euroscepticism among Europe's citizens and we analyse how public opinion is cued by media and political parties.
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Notes
The articles in this special issue were presented at a conference on ‘Sources and Consequences of Euroscepticism’, which was funded by the Chair in Multilevel Governance at the Free University of Amsterdam. We would like to thank conference discussants Susan Banducci, Mark Franklin, Jeff Karp, Hans Keman, Petr Kopecky, Peter Mair, Cas Mudde, Paul Pennings, Philippe Schmitter, and Jacques Thomassen, as well as the anonymous reviewers of this special issue, for their comments.
The first public use of ‘Euro-sceptic’ was recorded in 1986, to describe British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The Times noted that Mrs Thatcher was ‘seen in most of the EEC as a Euro-sceptic at best’ (The Times, 30 June 1986, 9/1). The prefix ‘Euro’ now graces around one hundred words according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED online, accessed on 18 May 2006).
That is, the contributions by Richard Eichenberg and Russell Dalton, Leonard Ray, Geoffrey Evans and Sarah Butt, Tapio Raunio, Ivan Llamazares and Wladimir Gramacho, Bernhard Wessels, Catherine de Vries and Kees van Kersbergen, and Liesbet Hooghe, JingJing Huo, and Gary Marks.
Other factors, such as identity and political construction, are at least as powerful as economic factors in shaping public and party preferences on European integration. Recently, the economic model of public opinion has come under serious attack from within its own ranks, that is to say, from leading scholars of public opinion and electoral behaviour. They argue that it is simply inappropriate to extend the assumptions of the economic voting model to the analysis of public opinion. Yet this is what has happened over the past decade. Critics call this a case of severe theory drift (Duch and Palmer, 2006).
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Hooghe, L., Marks, G. Sources of Euroscepticism. Acta Polit 42, 119–127 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500192
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500192