What Do Europeans Really Think about the Single Market?

• In Event: Comparative Federalism of Single Markets in the US and the EU

Abstract

The Single Market is widely recognized as the core of the European Union and its greatest achievement, but we know remarkably little about what Europeans think of it. Regular surveys like Eurobarometer pose very few questions about the regime for intra-European openness or related attitudes about markets and levels of government authority. This presumably reflects experts’ skepticism that citizens pay much attention to the regulation of cross-border access. That seems plausible, especially given that founders of the EU like Jean Monnet centered their project on these issues precisely for their low salience. According to the “Monnet method,” centering integration on single-market regulatory terrain was appealing not only because it addressed some policy problems, but because it might proceed under the radar of politicized attention and gradually win support for Europe through welfare-enhancing effects. This paper draws on an unprecedented 2023 survey of attitudes about single-market governance in Europe and the United States, drilling into variations in the 16,000 responses on the EU side (from 8 EU member-states). It evaluates how clearly Europeans have well-structured views on this terrain, and then explains variation in those views by testing hypotheses about utilitarian concerns, national identity, partisan cues, and postmaterialist (or “GAL-TAN”) values. Europeans do generally seem to hold structured attitudes about single-market governance. Postmaterialist value orientations emerge as the most consistent predictor of individual attitudes towards EU single market policies—more so than individuals’ positioning within the economy. Identity and partisanship do more work in explaining variation across member-states.

Authors

• Martin Moland, University of Oslo

• Tobias Bach, University of Oslo