The financial crisis that the member states of the European Union are undergoing started in 2008 and developed into a sovereign debt crisis from early 2010. The sovereign debt crisis and the following recession, however, did not affect the different countries to the same extent – regardless of whether they were new or old member states. This way, differences between old and new member states in terms of attitudes towards the EU might have become more blurred. Findings of an earlier paper confirmed that, besides identifying decreasing support for the EU, the East vs. West divide has indeed somewhat decreased between 2007 and 2011. However, the basic patterns underlying the attitudes which exist have not changed: there remains a higher probability that a respondent from a CEE country will be indecisive about their support for the EU and a citizen of an older member state will hold a negative opinion.
In this current paper the short term effects of the crisis will be placed into a longer term context to see how the short term effects of the crisis relate to tendencies of an eventual convergence of attitudes towards the EU on the longer term. The paper wishes to contribute to the literature on the utilitarian and political drivers of public opinion about the European Union by taking the short term effect of the present economic cycle (the crisis) and measures of the political performance of a country into account (including both individual and country-level indicators).
The analysis will be carried out using Eurobarometer survey data (2004-2012) focusing on over time and cross-country tendencies. In order to correctly address attitudes towards the EU, the indicator chosen in this current analysis includes indifferent or neutral opinions in addition to positive and negative ones.
