Towards a Federal Europe by Alexander H. Trechsel

Author:Alexander H. Trechsel [Trechsel, Alexander H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415463881
Amazon: B00FDRBMQG
Barnesnoble: B00FDRBMQG
Goodreads: 20185964
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2007-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 1 Response pattern for question on level of decision-making (national or jointly within EU) in twenty-five policy areas (2003), EU twenty-five members

To assess whether some interviewed individuals responded haphazardly we would need ideally observations over time to assess the stability of their opinions. In the absence of such data, we rely on the individuals’ self-assessment about their knowledge on the EU. We depict in Figure 1 the response patterns for three groups distinguished by the subjective perception of their knowledge about the EU (low, middle, high).14 The response patterns across the twenty-five policies for the different groups of subjective knowledge are presented in Figure 1. This analysis indicates essentially that the proportion of EU-phobics is much smaller among individuals with a high level of knowledge about the EU. EU-phobics represent 11.5 per cent of the lowest subjective knowledge group, less than 5 per cent of the middle subjective knowledge and a small proportion of 3 per cent for the individuals with high subjective knowledge of the EU. There is no such tendency for the EU-phils. Whatever the level of subjective knowledge the proportion of EU-phils is high. The proportion of EU-phils is even higher for the group with the highest level of subjective knowledge (13 per cent) than for groups with lower levels of subjective knowledge (about 11 per cent for both groups). Moving from a low level of knowledge to a mid or high level of subjective competence increases the proportion of individuals on the right-hand side of the distribution. In short, systematic EU-phobic answers appear essentially for less informed respondents.

The tri-modal distribution in the response pattern for the twenty-five policy areas still raises the question of how people perceive the vertical distribution of competencies from the national to the European level for each policy. The third column of Table 1 presents the percentage of respondents who are in favour of decisions taken jointly within the EU for each policy area. In the first column we list the policy areas covered by the questions and in column 2 the question number is given.15 What clearly appears in this table is that the percentage of respondents favouring decisions taken jointly within the EU is rather important. It varies between 31.4 per cent (b4, Police) and 84.1 per cent (b10, The fight against the trade in, and exploitation of, human beings). Apart from this last category we find the following policy areas where voters strongly prefer decisions to be made jointly within the EU: Information about the EU, its policies and institutions (a13, 81.1 per cent), Foreign policy towards countries outside the EU (a14, 78.0 per cent), The fight against organized crime (b3, 77.1 per cent) and Humanitarian aid (a4, 75.6 per cent). After Police, the policies that citizens would like to see least in joint hands with the EU are Justice (b5, 31.4 per cent), Education (a11, 37.4 per cent), Health and social welfare (a5, 37.8 per cent), Urban crime prevention (b8, 38.4 per cent) and Basic rules for broadcasting and press (a6, 38.

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