June 21

4:00 PM - 5:45 PM

2.A.03

Aleksey Domanov

Abstract: During recent two years Eurosceptics in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, France, Germany and the UK managed to attract citizens suffering from globalization [Kriesi, Holmes]. Although these voters strived for protection against some risks inherent in a globalized economy, they expressed doubts that the EU could protect them from these threats by developing common and single policies.

The reasons for public discontent with shaping coordinated EU policies require scrupulous research, as after applying Easton’s ‘feedback loop’ concept to this spread of Euroscepticism one may forecast sovereignist policy adjustments and law adoption hindering further communitarization. As the abovementioned Easton’s model of political system puts an emphasis on information exchange, it seemed justifiable to focus on the factors related to information processing and voters’ cognition.

A regression analysis of 28 thousands EU citizens’ answers to ‘Eurobarometer’ questionnaires collected in November 2017 confirmed that the likelihood of communitarization approval was affected by principal components of voters’ ‘cognitive mobilization’ level (suggested by Inglehart, Dalton, Hix, Wessels etc.). Common foreign, security and energy policy were found to be least criticized by well-educated citizens with high interest in politics, accurate factual knowledge about the EU, who frequently discussed EU-related topics.
At the same time various links (mainly, including migration policy preference as a dependent variable or age as an independent one) took U-shaped form. This non-linear character was attributed to selecting primarily negative information on the EU by some respondents (due to ‘hot cognition’ and confirmation bias – as defined by Kahneman, Tversky, Cisler, Bacon etc.).

Disciplines: Political Science
Sociology

Substantive Tags: Emotions, European Union and Integration, Political Communication

Research Networks: None of the Above

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