Paper Titles & Abstracts

Recent trends suggest that the European Union (EU) citizenry is becoming more critical of the EU. However, despite significant changes in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent national-level adoption of substantial austerity measures, standard models of support for the EU have failed to account for this. We use a multi-level approach on the European Elections Study 2009 in all 27 member states of the EU to argue that individuals' perceptions of inequality and their normative orientation to strong democratic institutions as counterbalances to market-generated inequality improves our understanding of EU support. In the context of the newest research, we further show that this relationship is consistent in the context of cross-national differences in economic and political performance.