The Eurosceptic citizen: understanding and explaining popular Euroscepticism

In this article, I study the dimensionality of the concept of EU support, which is assumed to be constituted of two dimensions: one that concerns the political integration, in terms of preferences for European vs National governance of strategic policy areas, and another one related to the instrumental evaluation of country’s EU membership based on a cost-benefit analysis. To corroborate empirically the validity of this conceptualization, I analyse cross-national data from the Intune project 2009, applying latent class factor analysis (LCFA). This hypothesis holds in 13 out of the 15 EU countries included in the study, where the presence of two separate latent factors is confirmed. These two dimensions of EU support are modelled as categorical factors, which allow outlining a typology of latent attitudes toward the European Union. Six latent classes of EU citizens are defined, which differ among each other for their evaluation of the EU integration. In the last section of this article, drawing from the literature on determinants of EU support, several predictors of latent class membership are tested using a Multinomial Logit Regression, and supporting evidence is found for the theories on the effect of affective and identitarian factors, and institutional distrust on the latent attitudes toward the EU.