“Education and Pro-European Orientation among Spain’s Youth: An Inquiry on Causal Mechanisms” (YOEDER) is a national project led by our fellow Juan Fernández and funded through a grant by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2021-127561OB-I00, 2022-2025).
Pro-European attitudes and European identity have received much attention in past decades from a wide array of academic disciplines – philosophy, history, phycology, sociology or political science. From a political sociology perspective, the literature documents a robust link between education and both attitudes to European integration and European identification. In spite of the education cleavage in pro- European attitudes is one of the best documented findings, the causal mechanisms mediating this relationship are not well understood nor adequately tested. How can we explain the well-known relationship between education and pro-European attitudes and European identification? Most empirical studies based their findings on cross-sectional data surveys, which are not the most appropriate for measuring temporal variations as they are influenced by time-constant individual characteristics. Following the latter recommendation, this subproject proposes an analysis of longitudinal changes in pro-European orientations among the Spanish youth. In particular we plan to build and analyze a 4-waves panel survey targeted to young Spaniards between the ages of 16 and 25. The panel will include questions to produce indicators of the main factors theorized to mediate between formal education and pro-European orientations. It will also include an experimental module, adding an innovative methodology to understand unresolved questions in the multidisciplinary literature on pro-European orientations. Why do we focus on young people? It is known from the field of political socialisation, specifically in its most widespread theory of the impressionable years, that young people are at the centre of their political learning. According to the literature on political socialization, individuals are more open to change during their youth, and once they enter into maturity, their attitudes tend to remain stable or even cristalyzed . Following this logic, examining this age group in which values and identifications tend to congeal allows us to analyse how stable or longitudinally variable are the orientations towards Europe and European integration. This subproject contributes to current research by expanding our knowledge on pro-European orientations and their determinants in a longitudinal perspective. It will do so by conducting the first panel survey study with a research design fully designed to identify the psychological and social mechanisms that explain the relationship between formal education and pro-European orientations. Since social mechanisms and mechanism-based explanations have received considerable attention in the social sciences, our study has the potential to generate theoretical or methodological contributions to the larger, cross-field area of analytical sociology and Europeanization studies.
