Public Attitudes towards Monetary Integration in Seven New Member States of the EU

Abstract

Existing work on euro support has provided insights into the dynamics of preferences, but most of these studies focus on older member states that already form an integral part of the Eurozone. This article inquires into public attitudes towards monetary integration in new member states of the EU: Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria and Lithuania. Focusing on the cross-sectional variation of preferences, it applies multilevel logit regression to test three perspectives – economic, conceptual and political – using individual-level survey data and NUTS-2 regional statistical data from seven countries for 2013. One of its novel findings is that beliefs such as the one that European Monetary Union (EMU) adherence will cause a spiral in economic inflation are powerful disincentives to euro support in these countries.

Keywords

• public support
• euro introduction
• inflation fears
• eurobarometer
• eurozone