Jörgen Westerståhl Lecture 2022
Society and economy
Welcome to the Jörgen Westerståhl Lecture with Simon Hix. The lecture title is "The Dance of European Integration: How Ideology and Policy Shape Public Support for the EU".
Welcome to the Jörgen Westerståhl Lecture with Simon Hix. The lecture title is "The Dance of European Integration: How Ideology and Policy Shape Public Support for the EU".
Looking across 50 years of public opinion data, Simon Hix will show how the relationship between political ideology and support for European integration has changed dramatically. In the 1970s and 1980s, people on the Right were more supportive of European integration than people on the Left. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Centrists were more supportive than Extremists. Today, the Left like the EU while the Right opposes it. Simon will argue that this pattern can be explained by the fact that attitudes towards the EU are endogenous to policy preferences. He develops a novel method for identifying the left-right position of EU policy outcomes and shows how citizens’ ideological distance from these outcomes predicts their support for European integration. This has implications for the design of EU policies going forward.