On the Impact of the European Union in Citizens’ Perception of Quality of Life

In the 2000s many important events have a↵ected the EU political and economic stage: the adoption of the Euro currency, the enlargement occurred in three waves, the big economic crisis in 2008 and the Brexit referendum in 2016, just to cite a few. It is common opinion that these shocks have contributed to deeply change the average citizens’ attitude towards the EU and have had a strong impact on citizens’ quality of life. The present work aims at analyzing the relationship between the EU and EU citizens’ perceived quality of life. This analysis is carried out in two-steps via firstly a nonlinear principal component analysis to extract underlying components of perceived quality of life related to the EU, and secondly using multilevel modeling to take into account country e↵ects influencing the overall quality of life. Specific attention is given to national di↵erences and the connection with the general citizens’ perception of quality of life.