Abstract/Summary

Cross-national differences in policy preferences across the European Union (EU) are allegedly too large to warrant further political integration. The progressive deepening of economic and policy ties across EU member States, together with the deepening of the European public sphere in the years since the Eurozone crisis might have, however, catalysed convergence in the policy preferences of EU citizens. Are cross-country differences in policy issue positions large, and did they appreciably decrease across the EU in the last decade? The study uses the EES Voter Studies of 2014, 2019 and 2024 to examine over-time trends in policy issue positions across EU member States. It leverages mean tests, analyses of variance, dyadic distributional comparisons via the Earth Mover's Distance measure, as well as analyses of prediction accuracy scores from ‘leave-one-country-out’ random forest models. By introducing the first evidence of Europeanisation of policy issue positions, the study shows that the potential for a supranational political demos – and for majoritarian decision-making – is there for a number of policy domains.