Economic benefits of membership have often been studied with regard to the development of support for integration. This implies that as the euro crisis has affected a wide range of economic indicators, the EU might find itself in a vicious circle of lower economic benefits leading to weaker support for integration, leading to weak responses to the crisis as it is easier for the European institutions and governments of the member states to answer the crisis quickly with a clear collective response when they are backed by public support.
However, contradictory conclusions appear concerning the impact of economic conditions on support for European integration. Neofunctionalist theory assumes that an ever closer integration and more economic benefits will strengthen loyalty to the European institutions (Haas, 1958). Different authors have tested this assumption, but with opposing conclusions (e.g. McLaren 2007; Risse, 2005). As these studies are based on different economic parameters, it is difficult to decide whether different results indicate substantive influences of member state characteristics or context, or that results just differ because of the application of a different operationalization of economic benefit. In this paper five different economic parameters are tested (perception of benefit, received structure funds, net contribution, trade surplus and spread) on the same data. Not all of these parameters are influenced by the euro crisis in the same way. It is therefore important to distinguish which economic indicators contribute to a stronger support for European integration and which indicators weaken this support to understand whether the vicious circle discussed above is likely to develop.
A multilevel analysis on Eurobarometer data over time for all 27 member states is expected to show that parameters that are most easily felt among citizens (perception of benefit and received structure funds) are more strongly related to support for European integration.
