Benchmarking Brexit: How the British Decision to Leave Shapes EU Public Opinion

Opportunity or threat? Public attitudes towards EU freedom of movement

“…However, our intuition regarding the effect on support for freedom of movement is the reverse. Intra-EU mobility has been primarily observed from poorer towards richer countries (European Commission 2014a;2014b;2017;Portes 2015). In 2009-2014, the largest increase of intra-EU migration inflows occurred in Germany (+219%), Austria (+86%), the UK (+57%), Denmark (+54%) and Finland (+60%) (European Commission 2017: 11).…”

“…We postulate that citizens employ the context of domestic politics in order to evaluate the costs and benefits of EU freedom of movement. We build on existing research that views national conditions serving as ÔbenchmarksÕ against which Europeans judge and evaluate integration (De Vries 2017;Rohrschneider 2002;Rohrschneider and Loveless 2010;S ‡nchez-Cuenca 2000). Specifically, we posit that citizen attitudes towards intra-EU mobility are likely to be affected by a countryÕs macroeconomic performance.…”

“…The financial crisis, along with the progressive lifting of transnational restrictions to workers from Central and Eastern Europe, further contributed to an increase in labour mobility. Intra-EU migration primarily occurred from poorer towards richer EU member states (European Commission 2014a;2014b;2017) with the number of EU migrants born in another EU country rising to 4 per cent in 2013 (European Commission 2014b: 5; for a brief history, see Portes 2015). The education levels of the ÔnewÕ active EU moversÕ cohort, i.e.…”

“…First, we fill a substantive gap in the literature by examining for the first time Euroscepticism from the perspective of preferences for EU freedom of movement. Second, we build on and extend literature that examines the domestic foundations of EU preferences (De Vries 2017;Rohrschneider 2002;Rohrschneider and Loveless 2010;S ‡nchez-Cuenca 2000) by pointing to the role of country-specific factors in understanding why some individuals support freedom of movement and others oppose it. We show that national GDP is the most prominent determinant of opposition to free movement.…”

Don't Mention the War! Second World War Remembrance and Support for European Cooperation

“…Studies have demonstrated that people benchmark the alternative state by extrapolating from current national conditions, specifically national economic performance and quality of government (De Vries, ). Similarly, the alternative state can be benchmarked based on previous precedents of other countries leaving, especially the UK's experiences with Brexit (De Vries, , ). Support for European integration and cooperation is higher when people think that they or their country would be worse off under the alternative state scenario.…”