Identifications and Cosmopolitan Vs. Communitarian Ideologies Underlying Support and Opposition of the EU

Do collective identities and perception of globalization as a threat matter in the endorsement of cosmopolitan and communitarian understandings of the EU ? Based on Eurobarometer survey data for Germany, we propose a fine-grained analysis of the ideologies underlying the support and opposition toward the EU, which we define as cosmopolitan and communitarian. In a second step, we assess the relevance of both objective socio-demographic characteristics and subjective measurements such as perception of globalization as a threat, supranational and national identities in the endorsement of these cosmopolitan and communitarian EU understandings. Our results show that socio-demographic characteristics play only a moderate role in the polarization of citizens along the cosmopolitan-communitarian dimension. Next to the socio-demographic characteristics, the subjective measurements have a large additional explanatory power in the polarization of German citizens along the communitarian-cosmopolitan dimension. These results highlight the importance of collective identities and perception of threat in the ideologies underlying support and opposition toward the EU.