New or Old Politics? Understanding public preferences for an EU single market

A large literature has investigated popular views of the EU as a polity, as well as its policies. However, despite its centrality to the EU project, we still know little about popular views of the EU's single market. This paper uses data from 8 EU countries to probe how utilitarian concerns, national identity and partisan cues both together and alone shape popular views of the EU's single market integration. We find that postmaterialist value orientation is a more consistent predictor of individual attitudes towards EU single market policies than an individual's positioning within the economy. We thus show that postfunctionalist explanations of support for the EU matter not only for explaining attitudes towards highly controversial policy integration like the post-1992 harmonization of migration and fiscal policies, but also towards a single market project that has been at the core of the European project since the 1950's.