Analysis of benefits and harms as a factor in citizen support to Croatian accession to the European Union

Abstract

This paper deals with the analysis of the utilitarian model of the explanation of popular support for Croatian entry into the European Union. The utilitarian model for explicating support or lack of support for accession to the EU has been analysed through subjective principled expectations of benefits and harms of entry into the Union at a personal and at a national level, and through concrete expectations at the level of twenty-two aspects of social and economic life. The research results show that on the basis of principled expectations it is possible precisely to predict support for entry into the EU, but that the principled expectations are not to any very great extent founded on concrete expectations in the observed aspects of social and economic life, and that they are to a certain degree linked with political viewpoints. On the other hand, concrete expectations are relatively weakly correlated with support for Croatian entry into the EU. Such a result suggests the conclusion that on the basis of a utilitarian explanation of support it is possible only relatively poorly to predict viewpoints concerning joining the EU, and that principled expectations of benefits and harms are in good part an expression of general impressions about the EU, trust in the political elite and political views of Croatian citizens, and to a lesser extent realistic rational calculations of harms and benefits. The paper is based on empirical survey of the views and spectations performed on a probabilistic national sample of a thousand citizens older than 15.