The Role of Public Opinion in EU Integration: Assessing the Relationship between Elites and the Public during the Refugee Crisis

Abstract

While the EU was still recovering from the Great Recession, the refugee crisis polarized and mobilized national and European political spaces, inducing governments to revise their immigration policies. Scholars are presently engaged in academic debate over whether these revisions can be explained by reference to grand theories of European integration. In this context, we ask the following questions. If public opinion favoured ‘constraining’ EU integration, can public concern over the refugee crisis prompt political elites to stand against a regulative solution that would replace the Dublin System? How do these trends align with the grand theories of EU integration? By analysing longitudinal surveys of elites, general public and experts, we show that public rejection of immigrants relates to elites' opposition to a supranational prevalence of EU institutions for setting immigration quotas, thus inhibiting integration on extra‐EU migrants' resettlement.

Peoples’ perspectives on the ‘Future of Europe’ – A comparative study from within and beyond the European Union

“…Notwithstanding the discussed options how to advance research about public opinion regarding future EU–non-EU relations and European integration more broadly, our study offers important evidence that such endeavours are feasible. That is, the claim by Di Mauro and Memoli (2021) that public attitudes regarding European integration are underestimated cannot be dismissed with arguments that citizens would not be able to contribute. While such a stronger involvement of the public may be good news for the democratic acceptance of the European project, the partly highly diverging preferences for the future path may pose a serious obstacle to satisfying citizens, or as nicely put by Costa (2019: 796), ‘(t)he more politicization spreads beyond institutional arenas, the more difficult will [sic] be for core actors in the decision-making process to keep the genie in the bottle’.…”

“…De Vries, 2018; Hooghe and Marks, 2005; McLaren, 2006), and various theoretical approaches explaining European integration and institutional outcomes on the other hand (e.g. Hooghe and Marks, 2019; Jachtenfuchs, 2001), ‘public attitudes within the integration process are still underestimated’ (Di Mauro and Memoli, 2021: 2). The latter holds particularly for the future trajectory of the integration process.…”

Emergency politics, mass sentiment and the EU during Covid

“…However, this expectation needs to be set against the heated debates on the EU’s involvement in past crises that heavily polarised public opinion on its role in crisis management (Goldberg et al 2020 ; Di Mauro and Memoli 2021 ). While the EU’s involvement in crafting joint solutions to address the consequences of the pandemic may be generally welcomed, it may also reinforce the views of a dissenting minority that perceives this involvement as yet another assault on national sovereignty.…”

Conceptualizing, Theorizing, and Measuring the Contributions of Business to Refugee Crises

“…Refugee integration—for which businesses play an important role—occurs in the context of wider political debates (Ferris, 2020). There is often a climate of hostility toward refugees in host countries (Di Mauro & Memoli, 2021; Hynie, 2018), although there is some evidence that this can be overstated and indeed ameliorated (Sana, 2021). Businesses, however, do need to consider the wider social context in which they respond to refugee crises, including dominant local ideologies.…”