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about the political consequences of such identities on the premise that they are contested and
shaped— that is to say, politically constructed—in national contexts.
We proceed by stages. In the next section we summarize theory on public opinion
towards European integration. In the following sections we operationalize key variables, and
evaluate their causal power in a multi-level analysis.
I. THEORIZING SUPPORT FOR EUROPEAN INTEGRATION
Political Economy
The main thrust of European integration has been to sweep away barriers to economic
exchange, facilitate mobility of capital and labor, and create a single European monetary
authority. It is not surprising, therefore, that explanations of public opinion on European
integration have focused, above all, on economic factors. They have drawn on the political
economy of trade regimes, and more recently, of varieties of capitalism.
The simplest expectation is that market liberalization tends to favor those with higher
than average levels of income, education, and occupational skill (Anderson and Reichert 1996;
Gabel 1998a,b; Inglehart 1970). There are several reasons for this. Market liberalization rewards
those who have high levels of human capital and penalizes those with low levels of human
capital (Gabel 1998a: 43; O’Rourke and Sinnott 2001); increases the international substitutability
of labor and consequently intensifies job insecurity, particularly for less skilled workers (Rodrik
1997); puts pressure on welfare systems (Huber and Stephens 2001); and shifts the burden of
taxation from mobile factors of production that have the option to exit the tax regime to
immobile factors that do not (Scharpf 2000).
Convention