Plus Ça Change: The Evolution of Public Support for European Integration Since 1952

6 March 2014
Christopher J. Anderson, Professor of Government at Cornell, on what Europeans have thought about the integration project and process since its inception.

UCL Department of Political Science Event

Despite a proliferation of analyses of public support for European integration, fundamental questions remain about what Europeans think about the integration project and process. This talk examines public opinion data since the genesis of the integration project to determine if there really are separable dimensions of support for Europe, whether public preferences for Europe become more structured as the integration process has evolved, and whether the trajectory of public support for integration reveals more stability or change. Analyses suggest that attitudes toward Europe reflect a single underlying dimension, and that the content of this dimension is stable over time. Moreover, statistical tests reveal that, over the long historical run, support for Europe is characterized by limited fluctuations around a stable mean in most countries.

Christopher J. Anderson, Professor of Government at Cornell, works at the intersections of political science, economics, and sociology. His research focuses on contextual models of human action. Such models view individuals as nested in a variety of social, economic, and political environments that shape and constrain their behavior.

In the areas of political economy and political sociology, he studies how differences in macro-political contexts across countries shape people's cognition and action. He has long been interested in popular consent and inequality in democracies and has written on the popularity of governments, the legitimacy of political institutions, and the link between welfare states and citizen behavior. His current research projects in this area examine how welfare states shape people's social and economic behavior and how host societies affect the propensity of immigrants to participate in politics. Anderson also works on the social science of sports, with a focus on the political economy of soccer.

Anderson has held appointments at several universities and business schools, including Oxford University's Nuffield College and Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management. He is the recipient of a number of awards, including the American Political Science Association's Heinz Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the Best Article Award from the Journal of Politics, and the Emerging Scholar Award from the APSA Section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior. He has served as President of the American Political Science Association's Section on European Politics and Society, and on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, European Union Politics, and the Journal of Politics.

A native of Germany, he studied at the University of Cologne, Virginia Tech, and Washington University in St.Louis, where he received his PhD.