Support for european integration among political and economic elites in southern europe. A comparative analysis in old and new members

Zusammenfassung

The main proposal of the article is to present the level of identification with the EU integration of political and economic elites in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain. The first part of the article present some historical evidences about the differences in support for the EU process by public opinion as well as elites in this area along time. The analysis begins with some descriptive evidences about the perception of both types of elites towards the three main dimensions of the project: identity, representation and scope of governance. In the second part, we propose some kind of statistical exploration (correlation analysis and some multivariable model) about the factors (independent variables), which could explain the attitudes of elites in each dimension (dependent variables) in each country.