Bonding Policies. Policy Feedbacks and Citizens' Attachment to the EU and the Nation-State. a Comparative Analysis of Focus Groups

In times of crisis, Europe’s resilience is expected to rest on citizens’ sense of belonging. The current literature widely acknowledges the multiple loyalties citizens entertain with their nation-state and the European Union. Yet, the sources of citizens’ feelings of belonging are still under scrutiny. One potential source has hardly been considered: public policies. The cornerstone of the policy feedback literature (Mettler & Soss, 2004; Campbell, 2012) suggests that the varied experiences citizens have with them as users, customers, beneficiaries, may be considered as a key component of citizens’ socialization. In line with it, this paper thereby explores how citizens’ experience with public policies contribute to shaping their feeling of belonging to a political community, in this case, their nation-state and the EU. In contrast to the much discussed literature on national and European identity, the paper argues that workers’ and employees’ sense of belonging is broadly fed by political factors – here public policies, whereas managers mostly emphasize cultural motives.

The empirical investigation of citizens’ experience with policies is challenging. In this exploratory phase, we use a series of focus groups conducted in Paris, Brussels and Oxford with workers, employees and managers. The focus groups were designed as an experiment to investigate citizens’ reaction towards European integration (Duchesne et alii, 2013). Our secondary analysis of these data first characterizes the features of individuals’ policy experiences. Second, we compare between groups and participants the ways in which their policy experiences interact with other political and social experiences in feeding their loyalties.