Individual sources of support for the EU and transnational cleavage beliefs: assessing the relationship

Despite growing interest in both party and citizens’ support for the EU, the relationship between sources of public attitudes toward the EU and the values deriving from structural cleavages remains poorly observed. Particularly, the emergence of a new Transnational Cleavage appears theoretically and empirically disconnected from the state of knowledge on the sources of support and opposition for the Union. How do past explanations of support for the EU relate to individual positioning along Green-Alternative-Libertarian (GAL) and Traditional-Authoritarian-Nationalist (TAN) values? Our research aims to bridge public opinion studies on support for the EU with cleavage theory, going beyond the analysis of party positions, but focusing, instead, on citizens’ beliefs at the individual level. Our results show that transnational cleavage defines a dimension on which explanatory factors of support for the EU align consistently. Differently from the U-curve of the left-right cleavage, it shows a linear trend profiling pros versus opponents of the EU integration proce