Integrated and United: A Quest for a Citizenship in an Ever Closer Europe (IntUne)

The project was financed by the EU and carried out in co-operation with 32 partner institutions. It explored the state of European integration with respect to the formation of a European citizenship, focusing on the dimensions of identity, representation, and scope and locus of governance. The project has conducted two waves of elite and mass surveys in 15 EU member states. The substantive contributions of MZES researchers have concentrated mainly on the issue of political representation. Theoretically, they have developed a new perspective of measuring representation as a two-step aggregation process that is sensitive to the intervening effects of political parties and government coalitions. Two-step aggregation with political parties has the potential to widely diverge from one-step aggregation that looks at institutions only. Fortunately, this seems not to be the case empirically: government positions on EU issues do not diverge substantially from those of the electorate. Another main empirical result is that issue congruence between citizens and their national MPs is better than earlier studies have suggested. Another result is that issue congruence is better for the policies already in place in the EU than those on the agenda for deeper integration. Finally, the study of political polarization in Europe identifies two different worlds, distinguishing the west of Europe from its post-communist east where polarisation is steadily rising.