Published as:Mitchell, Kristine. Does European Identification Increase Support for Further Economic Integration? Journal of European Integration 36, no. 6 (2014): 601-618. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07036337.2014.916286 This author post-print is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit Taylor and Francis's Website. © 2014. This publication is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Explanations of support for European Union policies are often conceived in terms of utilitarian cost-benefits analysis, yet recent scholarship has demonstrated that ‘soft’ variables, such as identity, are sometimes more useful for explaining preferences about European integration. This article tests a hypothesised link between European identity and support for integrative economic policies to respond to economic crisis in the Eurozone. Data to test the hypothesis are from a novel survey of European university students (n = 1872) conducted in autumn 2012 in four Eurozone countries (France, Germany, Italy and Spain). Given the economic nature of the policies in question, this is a case where utilitarian calculations might be expected to drive preferences. Yet in each of the four countries, European identity is found to have a significant positive relationship with support for further economic integration, even when controlling for material considerations that might otherwise have been thought to explain these preferences.