SITUATIONS AND PUBLIC EUROSCEPTICISM: TOWARDS A RELATIONAL UNDERSTANDING OF DISCONTENT WITH THE EU

The last two decades have represented a period of crises for the EU, through which its legitimacy and sometimes even its survival have been questioned. As a result, challenges to the European project are claimed to be on the rise. The phenomenon of Euroscepticism is one of these challenges posed against the Union and is exemplified in the electoral success of challenger parties in the last two European Parliament (EP) elections. While the literature on Euroscepticism appears to be well-developed in terms of analysing the explanatory power of the four dimensions of utility, identity, political cues, and benchmarks, situations in which citizens are involved and their potential effects on their attitudes towards the EU remain understudied. This research aims to fill this gap by introducing a situational lens to the analysis of public Euroscepticism referring to citizens’ sceptical attitudes towards the EU. By focusing on three situational dimensions as economic, family, and contextual, the present research contends that situations are a vital aspect of citizens’ information processing and attitude formation processes. To empirically test these assumptions, those three situations are applied to the two heated topics in Euroscepticism literature as EU membership support and Eurosceptic vote choice. Our results provide empirical support to our presumptions and establish situations as significant indicators of both citizens’ perceptions of their countries’ membership in the EU and also their reactional electoral preferences from Europhile parties to Eurosceptic parties and electoral absenteeism. In this way, this research calls for a relational approach that will leave the door open to situations and their political repercussions, which might be a better approach to understanding and explaining the causes and consequences of the phenomenon.