The Role of Public Opinion in EU Integration: Assessing the Relationship between Elites and the Public during the Refugee Crisis

Abstract

While the EU was still recovering from the Great Recession, the refugee crisis polarized and mobilized national and European political spaces, inducing governments to revise their immigration policies. Scholars are presently engaged in academic debate over whether these revisions can be explained by reference to grand theories of European integration. In this context, we ask the following questions. If public opinion favoured ‘constraining’ EU integration, can public concern over the refugee crisis prompt political elites to stand against a regulative solution that would replace the Dublin System? How do these trends align with the grand theories of EU integration? By analysing longitudinal surveys of elites, general public and experts, we show that public rejection of immigrants relates to elites' opposition to a supranational prevalence of EU institutions for setting immigration quotas, thus inhibiting integration on extra-EU migrants' resettlement.