The Europeanisation of policy preferences: Cross-EU policy issue positioning 2014-2024

Organised by

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• EGPP: European Governance and Politics Programme

The diversity in the policy preferences of European Union (EU) citizens is allegedly too large to warrant further political integration. However, the progressive deepening of economic and policy ties across EU Member States, together with the expansion of the European public sphere since the Eurozone crisis, may have catalysed increasing convergence in the policy preferences of EU citizens. Did between-country differences in policy issue positions and their predictors appreciably decrease over the past decade across the EU? This study uses the EES 2014, 2019, and 2024 Voter Studies to examine over-time trends in policy issue positions across EU Member States. It leverages mean tests, analyses of variance, dyadic distributional comparisons via the Earth Mover's Distance measure, as well as cross-validation accuracy tests from random forest predictive models trained using a ‘leave-one-country-out’ approach. By presenting the first evidence of the Europeanisation of policy issue positions, the study demonstrates the potential for an emerging supranational political demos.