Europeans evaluate the European Community (EC) according to its economic performance, political salience, and role in international relations. During the last two decades their measured attitudes toward European integration warmed especially when inflation rates fell, as the EC share of the country's trade expanded, when EC elections and referenda increased attention to the community, and to some extend during periods when East-West relations were relaxed. Europeans did not vary their support according to their countries' shares of the Brussels budget. Thus, notwithstanding Denmark's 1992 rejection of the Maastricht treaty and the end of the cold war, recent EC reforms that increase monetary stability, intra-European trade and political attention are all likely to maintain or increase citizen support for the EC. These findings result from a model that blends comparative political economy with international relations in one of the first applications of pooled cross-sectional and time-series analysis to the comparative study of public opinion.
Although previous studies have examined U.S. public support for the use of military force in particular historical cases, and have even made limited comparisons among cases, a full comparison of a large number of historical episodes in which the United States contemplated, threatened, or actually used military force has been missing. An analysis of U.S. public support for the use of military force in twenty-two historical episodes from the early 1980s through the Iraq war and occupation (2003-05) underscores the continuing relevance of Bruce Jentleson's principal policy objectives framework: the objective for which military force is used is an important determinant of the base level of public support. The U.S. public supports restraining aggressive adversaries, but it is leery of involvement in civil-war situations. Although the objective of the mission strongly conditions this base level of support, the public is also sensitive to the relative risk of different military actions; to the prospect of civilian or military casualties; to multilateral participation in the mission; and to the likelihood of success or failure of the mission. These results suggest that support for U.S. military involvement in Iraq is unlikely to increase; indeed, given the ongoing civil strife in Iraq, continuing casualties, and substantial disagreement about the prospects for success, the public's support is likely to remain low or even decline.
Macroeconomic forces have influenced aggregate citizen support for European integration in the past, but no study analyzes historical data beyond the early 1990s. This gap is lamentable, because public support for integration has moved in precisely the opposite direction that past research would predict. We analyze data on support for the EU during the period 1973-2004 for eight long-term member states. Four conclusions emerge from the analysis. First, there has been considerable cross-national convergence in citizen support for integration. Second, although economic factors influence citizen support over the entire 1973-2004 period, these impacts are much weaker than reported in past research. Third, the effect of inflation and trade concentration essentially disappeared in the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty. Fourth, citizen support for integration of specific policy areas, such as foreign policy, social security, and monetary policy, suggests that the precipitous decline in support that began in 1991 was a reaction to Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and its budgetary implications. We argue that the politics of European integration are now animated by distributive concerns as well as by evaluations of absolute economic performance. This argument has important implications for the study of European integration.
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