Replay - Simon Hix, "The Dance of European Integration: How Ideology and Policy Shape Support for the EU"

"The Dance of European Integration: How Ideology and Policy Shape Support for the EU"

CEE General Seminar, 7 February 2023

Speaker: Simon Hix, Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute;
Chair: Jan Rovny, Sciences Po Associate Professor at the CEE and LIEPP;
Discussant: Chiao Li, PhD candidate at the CEE.

Abstract

Analysing 50 years of public opinion data and EU policy outputs, Simon Hix and Bjørn Høyland show how the relationship between political ideology and support for European integration has changed dramatically. In the 1970s and 1980s, people on the Right were more supportive of European integration than people on the Left. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Centrists were more supportive then Extremists. Today, the Left likes the EU while the Right opposes it. Simon and Bjørn argue that this pattern can be explained by the fact that attitudes towards the EU are endogenous to policy preferences. They develop a novel method for identifying the left-right position of EU policy outcomes, and show how citizens’ ideological “distance” from these outputs predicts their support for European integration. This has implications for the design of EU policies going forward.

Speaker

Simon Hix is the Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute (EUI), in Florence. Prior to the EUI, Simon spent many years at the London School of Economics, where he was the Vice President for Research and the Harold Laski Professor of Political Science. Simon’s research and teaching focus on comparative political behaviour and institutions, in particular parties and party systems, electoral systems, legislative behaviour, and European Union politics. He has held visiting positions at, among other places, Stanford, Berkeley, Sciences Po, UC San Diego, the Hertie School, and the Korean Institute for International Economic Policy. Simon is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

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