11:00 - 13:15
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Liisa Talving
Discussant/s:
Isabel Ruiz
Meeting Room I

Nina Obermeier
We are (almost) all internationalists now: How right-wing populism drives support for international economic integration in post-crisis Europe

Liisa Talving
A new divide in New Europe: Deepening conflict over globalisation in Central and Eastern Europe

Massimo Troncone, Roberto Valli
A Europe of Minorities: Domestic Minority Status and Support for the European Union
A Europe of Minorities: Domestic Minority Status and Support for the European Union
Massimo Troncone 1, Roberto Valli 2
1 European Politics, ETH Zurich
2 International Conflict Research, ETH Zurich

The nation-state grants the highest status and the most opportunities to the country's titular nation. European integration challenges this traditional form of statehood. It erodes national boundaries and weakens the relationship between the state and the nation. It therefore possesses a strong normative appeal for national minority groups. In particular, we hypothesize that minority individuals have stronger support for European integration than the 'core nationals.' We test this rather simple, and yet largely overlooked, intuition using multiple rounds of the European Social Survey. Our empirical strategy relies on coarsened exact matching to identify suitable counterfactuals between minority and majority individuals. Results indicate a robust positive effect of minority status -- operationalized along legal, ethnic and linguistic traits -- on support for European integration. We further investigate the microfoundations of this effect and hypothesize that the impact of minority status on EU support works primarily through perceived discrimination. Finally, we analyze majority-minority differences in EU support among two groups of countries with peculiar dynamics of ethnic politics, that is states with large Russian minorities and multinational states with formal power-sharing arrangements. The results are entirely compatible with our theory. Altogether, our contribution demonstrates the importance of accounting for the broader social grouping of individuals in public opinion studies, and of nationalism in EU politics.