Understanding popular Euroscepticism

In this article, I study the dimensionality of the concept of EU support, which is expected to be constituted by two latent dimensions: one that concerns political integration, in terms of European vs National governance of strategic policy areas, and another one related to the instrumental evaluation of country’s EU membership based on cost-benefit analysis. To assess the validity of this theory, I separately analyse cross-national data from the Intune project 2009 and the European Election Study 2014, applying latent class analysis (LCA) as a statistical method to address the research question. Using the Intune 2009 dataset the theory holds in 13 out of the 15 EU countries included in the study, whereas, the same analysis for the EES 2014 dataset leads to an inconclusive result. These two dimensions of EU support are modelled as discrete-ordinal factors, which allow outlining a typology formed by six types of attitudes. Furthermore, several predictors of the class membership are separately tested, and supporting evidence is found for the theories on the effect of affective and identitarian factors, institutional distrust, and cognitive mobilization on the attitudes toward the EU.