European integration has grown increasingly contentious in the past two decades. Recent scholarship has emphasized the role of attitudes rooted in social identity—such as national identification and hostility towards immigrants and outside religions—in explaining opposition to the European Union (EU). This paper develops an argument drawing on the psychological concept of authoritarianism—an individual predisposition towards order, group cohesion, and reliance on established authorities—to explain opposition to the EU. Recent work on authoritarianism has highlighted the role of threat in shaping authoritarian responses to new political issues but produced conflicting results about its effect. One set of works suggests that threat increases the gap in attitudes between authoritarians and non-authoritarians (i.e., a positive interaction between authoritarianism and threat), while a recent study of American politics finds that threat reduces this gap (i.e., a negative interaction). Using newly collected survey data from Germany and the UK, I examine the interactive effect of perceived threat and authoritarianism on attitudes towards the EU in order to shed light on this debate. The findings of this study have crucial implications not just for the study of EU attitudes but for our broader understanding of how authoritarianism shapes political attitudes.
