Existing research highlights the roles of group identities and concerns about mass migration in explaining attitudes towards the European Union (EU). However, studies have been largely silent on whether EU attitudes are also shaped by people's attitudes towards the principles and practices of supranational governance. This research provides a first test of the nature and role of supranational attitudes. We introduce a new measure of supranationalism and, in two studies using samples drawn from the British population, test the psychometric properties of the supranationalism scale. We then identify the socioideological correlates (right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation) of supranationalism, along with its effects in predicting EU attitudes and post-Brexit preferences. Our core finding is that supranationalism predicts attitudes towards the EU over and above established factors such as national identity and immigrant threat. Our study thus shows the existence of supranational attitudes among individuals and the relevance of such attitudes to people's opinions about international organizations like the EU.
For many years, critics of Britain's democratic system have argued that it is atrophying. They have claimed that citizens are able to exert only weak control over a system of government that finds it difficult to meet popular needs and demands because of its centralised nature (Barnett, 1993). But in 1997 the Conservative government, whose leader, John Major, had enthused about the traditions and institutions of British life, was replaced by a Labour administration which embraced calls for the reform of many of those same institutions. For example, less than a year before becoming Prime Minister, Tony Blair argued:Changing the way we govern, and not just changing our government, is no longer an optional extra for Britain. So low is public esteem for politicians and the system we operate that there is now little authority for us to use unless and until we first succeed in regaining it (Blair, 1996).
There appears to be a crisis of political participation in Britain. Turnout at the last UK general election was, at 58 per cent, lower than at any other general election since 1918. Moreover, voters have been reluctant to go to the polls in every other kind of election held over the last six years. Unsurprisingly, then, politicians of all political persuasions have been asking themselves how they can 're-engage' the public with the political process.This decline in electoral participation might seem particularly surprising given one of the key social changes to have occurred in Britain over the last two decades -the expansion of educational attainment. Education is supposedly a 'democratic good', meant to encourage adherence to democratic values, a sense of political competence and thus a greater propensity to vote (Almond and Verba, 1963;Wolfinger and Rosenstone, 1980). As Almond and Verba's study of The Civic Culture put it:The educated classes possess the keys to political participation and involvement while those with less education are less well equipped.As Table 5.1 shows, in the mid-1980s nearly half the adult British population had no educational qualifications. Now, less than a quarter are in this position. Over the same period, the proportion with a degree has more than doubled (to 16 per cent), while those with at least an A level or its equivalent now comprise well over two-fifths of the adult population (rather than just over a quarter as they did two decades ago). So Britain has experienced a substantial increase in overall levels of educational attainment, something we might expect to produce an increase in electoral participation. That the very opposite seems to have happened is nothing less than a 'puzzle of participation ' (Brody, 1978).
Governments rely on citizen compliance for official rules to be effective. Yet achieving compliance is often tricky, particular when individual costs are high. Under what conditions will citizens voluntarily respect collective rules? We explore public compliance with SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) restrictions, focusing on the role of political trust. We anticipate that the effects of trust on compliance will be conditional on the presence of other factors, notably fear of infection. Low levels of fear may provide room for trust to shape compliance; yet high levels of fear may ‘crowd out’ the role of trust. We hypothesize that, at the pandemic’s outset, compliance was likely to be shaped more by fear than by trust. Yet as the pandemic progressed, the impact of fear on compliance was likely to have weakened, and the impact of trust to have strengthened. These hypotheses are tested using longitudinal data from Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Across western democracies, citizens are held to expect much of politicians, yet governments are supposed to be ill-equipped to deliver against those expectations. The net result is said to be a widespread sense of political disappointment; a negative balance between what citizens expect of government and what they perceive governments to deliver. Yet little attention has hitherto been paid to which kinds of citizens are particularly disappointed with politics, and why. This paper offers one of the first empirical analyses of political disappointment. Drawing on a survey conducted in Britain, it quantifies political disappointment and explores which social groups are more prone to disappointment than others. The analysis considers whether certain groups are more disappointed with politics by virtue of expecting a lot of government or by virtue of perceiving government performance in a particularly poor light.
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