The Department of Political Science cordially invites you to the political science departmental seminar
Transnational solidarity and public support for EU enlargement
presented by
Andrei Gheorghiţă
Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu
Date: November 26, 2013 – 5.30 pm,
Venue: CEU, Nádor u. 11, Room #004.
Abstract: (Co-author: Horaţiu Rusu, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu)
What makes people support the European project has been a topic of constant research in the social sciences during the last decades. The key explanations of attitudes towards the EU integration and enlargement processes are mainly related to identity issues, trust in political institutions, post-materialism, cognitive mobilization and utilitarianism. This paper revisits these explanations and adds a new ingredient to the debate, namely the role of solidarity in confining sceptic attitudes towards enlargement. We hypothesize that a deficit of transnational solidarity at the level of citizens springs into reluctance about further EU enlargement. For this purpose we employ a multilevel approach on individual-level data from the European Values Study 2008-2009 and contextual data for 42 countries. Our findings support the idea of a significant, positive relation between transnational solidarity and pro-enlargement attitudes.