Civil Society and Activism in Europe: Contextualizing Engagement and Political Orientations by William A. Maloney & Jan Deth

Author:William A. Maloney & Jan Deth [Maloney, William A. & Deth, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415560436
Goodreads: 8202048
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

7.2 The associational impact on European attitudes

The issue of citizens’ support for the EU and its institutions has became more salient in recent years, which have witnessed the deepening of European integration, seemingly accompanied by the increasing detachment of European citizens. Opinion polls (such as the Eurobarometer)2 have repeatedly confirmed a growing dissatisfaction with European institutions among European citizens (with an approximately 50 per cent dissatisfaction rating; Pache 2001). This trend is also evident within the new member countries (for example, in the low voter turnout in the 2004 European election; Crepaz and Steiner 2007: 291). Qualitative research on the ways in which ordinary citizens conceive Europe have stressed that the EU is largely perceived as opaque, distant, non-responsive and inefficient (Díez Medrano 2003: Chapter 2). Furthermore, the levels of (and reasons for) support for Europe vary greatly from country to country. British citizens tend to look at Europe in terms of a loss of national identity; conversely, Spaniards see Europe as a mechanism for ‘normalizing’ their country, while in Germany Europe projects a more positive image of the country as a corrective to its Nazi past (Díez Medrano 2003: 203).

However, citizens’ political orientations are also considered to be influenced by their participation in associational activities. Accordingly, we begin by examining the question: does associational participation foster pro-European feelings? Namely, does it favour interest in European politics and trust in European institutions? The CID question concerning interest in European politics is:

People’s interest sometimes varies across different areas of politics. How interested are you in each of the following areas? Local politics, national politics, European politics and international politics.3

Trust in the EU is captured by a question asking:

Listed below are several institutions such as the police, government, civil service, the European Union etc. (…) Please, indicate your level of trust in each of these institutions?4

If associational participation can positively contribute to the promotion of European support, our simple expectation to be verified here is that associational activists are more interested in European politics and trustful in European institutions than are citizens in general. Obviously, a self-selection bias problem might exist – that is, those who hold (positive) attitudes and orientations might join associations, so organizational contexts have little impact on the development of these attitudes. However, we cannot test this alternative explanation with the data available. What we can do to test this hypothesis is contrast associational activists with other two categories of ‘ordinary’ citizens – namely, the ‘socially actives’, who are respondents from the population surveys saying that they ‘are active or volunteer in some voluntary associations’, and the ‘non-actives’, who are interviewees in the general population who state that they are not active in any association. If our expectation of a positive impact of associational participation on trust and interest in Europe is confirmed, we should also find that activists can be considered as the ‘hard-core’ (of civically engaged people), characterized by higher levels of interest in European politics and trust in European institutions than socially actives. Simultaneously, activists

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