European Integration Deepened an Education Divide in EU Support

Why This Question Matters

Sharon Baute and Tobias Tober ask whether the long process of European institutional integration changed who supports the European Union. Educational differences in EU support matter because widening gaps between higher- and lower-educated citizens can affect democratic legitimacy, representation, and the political dynamics of support for supranational institutions.

What the Authors Did

The authors use 85 waves of the Eurobarometer survey from 1976–2014, covering 15 countries and more than 820,000 respondents, to trace how public attitudes toward the EU evolved as European institutions became more integrated. They apply Bayesian mixed-effects (multilevel) models to link individual-level education and EU support to country-level measures of institutional integration, while separating institutional effects from general time trends.

Key Findings

• The gap in EU support between more and less educated individuals grew as a country’s level of EU institutional integration increased.
• Less-educated respondents became progressively less supportive of the EU as integration deepened, driving much of the widening difference.
• The authors highlight that this pattern is tied to institutional development itself rather than being solely an artifact of long-term temporal change.

Implications for Scholarship and Policy

These results indicate that institutional change at the European level reshapes the social bases of support for the EU. The study urges analysts and policymakers to account for institutionalization—not just calendar time—when explaining trends in public opinion, and raises questions about how increasing delegation and supranational capacity interact with educational inequality to produce distinct patterns of political support.