The Role of Human Values in Explaining Support for European Union Membership

In recent years, there has been greater scholarly enquiry into explaining variation in support for European Union membership. We theorise that one cause of such variation is likely to be non-political psychological predispositions, such as one’s personal values. We test this proposition by applying...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of cross-cultural psychology
Authors: Dennison, James (Author) ; Seddig, Daniel (Author) ; Davidov, Eldad 1971- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Sage 2021
In: Journal of cross-cultural psychology
Further subjects:B referendums on European integration
B Euroscepticism
B attitudes to immigration
B Human Values
B European Identity
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary:In recent years, there has been greater scholarly enquiry into explaining variation in support for European Union membership. We theorise that one cause of such variation is likely to be non-political psychological predispositions, such as one’s personal values. We test this proposition by applying Schwartz’s theory of basic human values to predict voting intentions in hypothetical referendums on EU membership. We theorise that these values determine both voting intentions and more proximate explanatory variables of support for EU membership: attitudes to immigration and identifying as European. Using data on 13 countries from the European Social Survey (N=24,703 citizens) and multigroup structural equation modeling, we demonstrate that this psychological framework effectively predicts voting intentions, notably in terms of the consistent cross-country evidence for indirect effects of values on support for membership via European identity and attitudes to immigration. We then discuss the implications of our findings, including differences in effects between countries.
ISSN:1552-5422
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of cross-cultural psychology
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1177/00220221211005082