|
Abstract:
This article investigates to what extent nationalist and anti-out-group drives contribute to the explanation of political euro-scepticism, in addition to economic and political drives. The authors disentangle individual-level, regional-level and country-level effects by using the European Social Survey, covering 21 European countries (n=34,160), which is enriched with region and country characteristics. Perceived threat from immigrants as well as political distrust increase political euro-scepticism, explaining low levels of euro-scepticism among higher educated people, higher income categories and socio-cultural specialists. At the contextual level, the authors find that scepticism increases with the distance to Brussels. Moreover, it is found that in countries where television broadcasts are dubbed, euro-scepticism is lower than in countries using subtitles. The authors find small effects from intra-EU trade and number of foreign tourists. In particular, differences between countries in political euro-scepticism are explained by duration of EU membership.
|
