Subnational economic conditions and the changing geography of mass Euroscepticism: A longitudinal analysis

Abstract

Existing research mainly analyzes mass attitudes towards the European Union (EU) from the national and individual‐level perspective. This paper adds to this literature by focusing on the relationship between EU support and subnational economic conditions, using harmonized survey data covering 40 years and 1.1 million respondents in 197 European regions. We first describe Europe's changing subnational conditions in terms of catch‐up, wealthy, declining and glass‐ceiling regions. The paper then develops and tests a set of hypotheses regarding the temporally dynamic relationship between EU attitudes and regions’ long‐ and short‐term economic conditions. Our analyses reveal important longitudinal variations in this relationship with low levels of geographic differentiation in public opinion giving way to clear spatial differences in recent years. Our findings are consistent with the idea that the Great Recession and Brexit have generated a new geography of both Euroscepticism in Europe's declining regions and EU support in its wealthy and catch‐up regions.

Falling behind whom? Economic geographies of right-wing populism in Europe

“… 7 Other studies that identify differences in public attitudes across the divide between rich and poor EU member states include De Vries ( 2018 ), Vasilopoulou and Talving ( 2020 ), and Mayne and Katsanidou ( 2022 ). …”