Who Is in Favour of Enlargement? Determinants of Support for EU Membership in the Candidate Countries' Referenda

This paper investigates both the macro and micro determinants of EU support as expressed in the 2003 referenda on EU membership and the 2002 Candidate Countries Eurobarometer survey data. It is found that favourable individual and regional characteristics, i.e., the “winners” of the transition process, are positively correlated with support for accession and voter participation. In contrast, those who should benefit from future EU transfers, i.e., the “losers” of the process, are less likely to vote and/or support EU membership. It is therefore argued that voters in the new member states assign greater weight on future benefits from liberalization and integration than on potential gains through redistribution. ∇ Prepared for the ZEI/WDI conference on Political Economy of Transition: Job Creation and Job Destruction, held at ZEI, Bonn on August 15-16, 2003. We are grateful to Tilman Brück, Victor Ginsburgh, Jurek Konieczny, Amie Kreppel, and Abdul Noury, participants in the ZEI/WDI conference and in seminars at ECARES, ZEI, and DIW Berlin for many helpful comments and suggestions. We are indebted to Peter Huber and Mihails Hazans for help with collecting regional data on economic characteristics in the candidate countries, and to Robert Manchin of The Gallup Organisation Europe for giving us access to the Candidate Countries’ Eurobarometer survey data. Orla Doyle was a Government of Ireland scholar funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, in IIIS Trinity College, while this research was being carried out. Institute for the Study of Social Change (ISSC), University College Dublin, Ireland Email: [email protected] ** Corresponding author. Brunel Univeristy; ECARES, Université Libre de Bruxelles; ZEI, University of Bonn; CEPR, London; and WDI, University of Michigan. Contact information: Brunel Univeristy, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected]. Phone: +44-1895-266-528, Fax: +44-1895-203-384.