The allocation of competences between the European Union and the Member States: an analysis of the determinants of Europeans’ preferences

In this paper we empirically study the preferences of European citizens concerning the allocation of powers between EU and the member States. To this aim, we use various issues of the Eurobarometer survey from year 1995 to year 2003. In the first part of the paper we present descriptive results regarding preferences of EU citizens by country and by policy domains and we find interesting results pointing out a ranking of countries according to their level of Europeanism, and a quite clear pattern of preferences relative to the allocation of competences for specific policy domains. In the second part of the paper we turn to econometric analysis; first, we regress a measure of “Europeanism” of EU citizens on a number of individual characteristics including demographic information and various indicators of the attitude towards EU. Next, we select a certain number of policy domains and, for each of these, we investigate which individual characteristics make European citizens more prone to prefer centralisation of competences. Also econometric analysis reveals interesting patterns regarding EU citizens’ preferences for allocation of powers.