Public support for European Union integration during migration and COVID-19 crises: dynamic and determinants

Dragan Stanojević, PhD and Anja Gvozdanović, PhD are the authors of the paper Public support for European Union integration during migration and COVID-19 crises: dynamic and determinants. The paper is published in “Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research“.

Abstract: The main focus of this article is to examine how the support for European Union (EU) integration has developed during the migration crisis and COVID-19 pandemics, considered one of the two most significant crises to have impacted EU countries in the decade before the war in Ukraine. The article aims to investigate the factors that influence public support for EU deeper integration during times of crisis while considering both individual traits and the wider social context. We have identified three groups of factors as possible predictors of attitudes towards the EU integration: identity, utilitarian, and system performance factors. For the analysis, we used data from four waves of the ESS European Social Survey (VII and VIII for the migration crisis and IX and X for the COVID-19 crisis). We analysed the data using multilevel modelling at three levels: individual, temporal, and country-level. Analyses show that all factors contribute to explaining citizens’ attitudes towards the EU, but the specificity of crises also leads to the specific weight of different factors.

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