In the end, will we all be Europeans? A two-phase analysis of citizens’ sentiment towards the EU

In the last decades an increasing effort has been expended to spread out citizens’ awareness for the European Union as an institution, but more recently, mainly due to the economic crisis spread out from 2008 onwards, less positive attitudes have started to form. Regular monitoring on the state of citizens’ view towards the EU, performed through opinion surveys, has undoubtedly shown a constant decline in citizens’ enthusiasm. However, findings from this paper reveal that, even in times when increasing unemployment, deprivation and bad life standards are hardly hitting the EU member states, especially in Southern countries, an underlying predisposition still prevail when individual characteristics and features of the countries where citizens live in are taken in due account. This hidden attachment is analyzed on the subset of EU15 countries using a two-phase approach: (i) first, potential latent features both at individual and contextual level explaining the EU attachment are searched; then (ii) these features are combined in a two-level model where the individual expectations from the EU and the expenditure in research and development of the country result the best predictors.