Business Elites and European Integration: Really a Honeymoon Story?

Abstract

The question whether elites contribute constructively to the process of European integration has become more crucial today in times of increasing Euroscepticism and populist opposition to the European Union in the member states. In this article we venture off beaten paths and focus on a hitherto much less investigated segment of society, business elites, and particularly on their attitudes towards the process of European integration. For this purpose, we focus on a cross-national survey of business elites with data from ten European countries. We show that levels of support for European integration are uneven across countries. At the same time, applying regression analysis, we find that the ways in which business elites shape their attitudes towards the European Union are not so different from those of public opinion, as individual-level factors are more influential on their attitudes than are the structural properties of their companies.