The assessment of citizens’ attitudes towards Europe is highly relevant for political research and most often explicit measures are used. However, during the last 20 years research in psychology has led to the notion that human behavior is not only determined by controlled, „explicit“ attitudes but also by so-called „implicit“ attitudes (for an overview see Friese et al. 2008). This differentiation has led to the development of implicit attitude measures. The advantage of implicit tests is that they allow measuring attitudes before they can be actively edited by their owners, respectively the assessment of attitudes which subjects might not have conscious access to.
That various political objects cause such implicit reactions has been proven (Lodge & Taber, 2005) as well as that implicit attitude measures are relevant for the explanation of political behavior (Choma & Hafer, 2009; Galdi et al. 2008; Roccato et al., 2010). It seems reasonable to implement implicit in addition to explicit EU-attitude measures assuming that a) European issues in general are less salient for citizens, b) in pro-European countries it seems socially less desirable to express individual EU-skeptical positions, and c) that current issues like the EURO crisis boost affective reactions which might be more accessible through implicit measures.
We therefore combine a standard explicit questionnaire with an affective misattribution procedure (AMP) to assess the correlation between implicit and explicit EU attitudes as well as their combined effects on citizens’ openness to engage with an EU-skeptical party. Based on a survey and test with a sample representative for the German population (N=570) we find significant correlations between explicit and implicit EU-attitudes moderated by political interest. In addition, our findings prove that citizens’ openness to engage with an EU-skeptical party depends not only on explicit EU-attitudes but also on the interaction with the implicit EU-attitude test.
