The formation of public opinion toward European integration: political rhetoric, party competition, and individual dispositions.

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I propose to conduct a series of seven political psychological experiments about the formation of public opinion toward European integration. My focus is on the influence that elites exercise on citizen attitudes through political rhetoric and party competition. I also plan to study how elite influence varies across individual dispositions that are known to be strongly associated with EU related public opinion, most importantly national identity and utilitarianism. My experimental findings will be extended through additional analyses of large scale data sets. The existing body of research relies almost exclusively on such observational data from public opinion surveys, media content analyses, and party manifesto codings. The shortage of experimental studies precludes valid conclusions about whether observed associations between elite characteristics and mass level opinion are the result of a bottom up process (citizens push elites to embrace certain positions) or a top down process (elites manipulate citizen views). An experimental approach allows for valid inferences about the direction of causality.Some prior contributions highlight the ability of elites to influence citizen views, while others emphasize the prevalence of attitudinal stability. This project attempts to determine the conditions under which public opinion about the EU is either malleable or securely rooted in individual dispositions. Experiments 1 and 4 study the interaction of national identity with different ways of portraying the EU. Experiment 7 analyzes how the effect of utilitarianism on EU attitudes is shaped by different configurations of party competition. Experiment 6 offers a test for the relative salience of utilitarianism and national identity in predicting EU attitudes. One overarching concern of the entire project, addressed directly in experiment 5, is to contribute more explicitly than prior work to general public opinion theories by comparing EU attitude formation to other domains. The emphasis of my research is on aspects of elite influence that have so far received no or only little attention. Experiments 4 and 5 study the cognitive processing of EU attitudes as an entirely untouched topic. I also examine various sources of elite influence that have not been studied in prior work, such as experts (experiment 1), individual politicians (experiments 2 and 3), groups of leaders (experiment 3), and abstract institutions (experiment 3). In terms of message content, I focus on political rhetoric in the form of political explanations (experiments 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6). The vast majority of existing research looks only at media effects such as priming or framing. Experiments 2, 3, 5, and 7 are concerned with the effects of partisan conflict, based on more sophisticated portrayals of party politics than those currently available in large scale data sets.