Abstract
How do citizens in EU member states think about the EU? And what are the implications of different ‘thinking styles’ for citizens’ preferences regarding formation of policies, politics and polity in the EU? The current paper uses relational class analysis (RCA); (Goldberg, 2011) and analyses perceptions of the EU as a political order by citizens in six selected member states. These include France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We build on the three constitutional models of the EU qua polity proposed by Fossum (2021) including: a) the EU as an intergovernmental political order; b) the EU as a federal union; and c) the EU as a regional cosmopolitan government. Each of the constitutional models contains specific features depending on how the political order is configured in terms of policies, politics and polity. In this paper we focus primarily on the perceived relationship between policy and polity. We developed a survey to test ‘thinking styles’ of the population in relation to the EU qua political order. The data was collected in March 2022 and target samples were over 1000 respondents per country. By identifying transnationally distributed ‘thought communities’, the paper shows how integration is perceived, in terms of which constitutional polity model enjoys popular support and hence what the popular pre-conditions for polity formation in a differentiated Union are.
Keywords
Constructs, European Union, Polity, Relational class analysis, Thought communities
