MAKING SENSE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION: MAPPING ‘THOUGHT COMMUNITIES’ IN SIX EU MEMBER STATES

How do Europeans make sense of the European Union (EU) and its processes of integration? Are there patterns of such understanding shared by citizens across borders of EU member states? The current article uses relational class analysis (RCA) to establish whether there are groups of citizens in selected EU member states sharing ideational construal of the EU. The purpose here is to complement extant studies of public attitudes towards the EU by exploring how citizens actually make sense of the Union. We develop an analytical framework and apply it to analyse survey data from a representative sample of citizens from six EU member states – Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Slovakia (N=4249).