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Introduction
After the signing of the Single European Act (SEA) in 1985, the Eurobarometer surveys indicated that citizen enthusiasm for European integration grew to historically unprecedented levels (Eichenberg and Dalton, 1993).1 By 1991 it reached a zenith in popular support for the European Union. However, as others in this volume have noted, public support for the European project began to erode following the Maastricht agreement (see Figure 1 - See PDF,).
Given the ambitious reform agenda laid out in the Maastricht Treaty, perhaps it is not surprising that Europe's leaders reacted to public alienation in the mid-1990s by articulating a commitment to respect citizen opinion: '...citizens are at the core of the European construction: the Union has the imperative to respond concretely to their needs and concerns'. (European Council, 1996, 1). This articles focuses on what factors determine the concerns of Europeans about the EU. We review existing studies of public opinion and European integration and highlight the consistent finding that macroeconomic performance and trade integration are strongly related to citizen support for integration.
However, most existing research on these economic factors extends only to the late 1980s or the early 1990s. Little published time series research includes the important post-Maastricht period. The paucity of recent research is a crucial gap in the literature, because the trends in public opinion after the Maastricht Treaty runs directly counter to the predictions of earlier research. Previous research suggests that macroeconomic performance had a strong positive influence on support for the EU up to 1990. However, public opinion then tracked dramatically downward despite the generally positive economic conditions of the 1990s. Recent experience therefore seems to undermine what we thought we knew about the determinants of domestic support for integration. This article explains this apparent anomaly by demonstrating that European citizens are increasingly more concerned about the distributive effects of integration than by aggregate economic performance.
Past Research on Citizen Support for European Integration
The explosion of academic and political interest that accompanied the relaunching of Europe in the mid-1980s stimulated several attempts to model the determinants of citizen support for European integration. A primary theoretical inspiration was utilitarian theories of EU support. In this framework, largely deduced from liberal trade and neofunctionalist theories, citizens evaluate...