It's Not the Economy, Stupid? Analyzing Icelandic Support for EU Membership

Curtis, K. Amber and Jupille, Joseph (2011) It's Not the Economy, Stupid? Analyzing Icelandic Support for EU Membership. [Working Paper] (Submitted)

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Abstract

What drives support for EU membership? We test the determinants of EU attitudes using original data from Iceland, whose recent woes have received wide attention. Given its crisis, we expect economic anxiety to drive public opinion. We find instead that economic unease is entirely mediated by assessments of the current government and that, despite the dire economic context, cultural concerns predominate. This suggests a potential disconnect between Icelandic elites’ desire for accession and the public will at large. Our results largely confirm prior findings on support for integration, further exposing the conditions under which individuals will evaluate EU membership favorably or negatively. They also highlight the utility of mediation analysis for identifying the mechanisms through which economic evaluations may operate and imply that economic indicators’ apparent insignificance in a host of other research areas may simply be a product of model misspecification.

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