How do citizens perceive the European Union?

The University of Barcelona is one of the eight partners taking part in PERCEIVE, a research project which analyses the perception of citizens in the European Union and the impact of the EU cohesion policy.
The University of Barcelona is one of the eight partners taking part in PERCEIVE, a research project which analyses the perception of citizens in the European Union and the impact of the EU cohesion policy.
Research
(29/06/2018)

The University of Barcelona is one of the eight partners taking part in PERCEIVE, a research project which analyses the perception of citizens in the European Union and the impact of the EU cohesion policy. The study, which is supported by the EU research programme Horizon2020, will be finished in August 2019, but it already offers some new insights, which caught the researchers by surprise. To cite one, the fact that despite having an unclear geographical pattern, those countries that entered the EU in the first and second expansion vividly show a higher feeling of identity with the European project and awareness of the cohesion policy than the founding members.

The University of Barcelona is one of the eight partners taking part in PERCEIVE, a research project which analyses the perception of citizens in the European Union and the impact of the EU cohesion policy.
The University of Barcelona is one of the eight partners taking part in PERCEIVE, a research project which analyses the perception of citizens in the European Union and the impact of the EU cohesion policy.
Research
29/06/2018

The University of Barcelona is one of the eight partners taking part in PERCEIVE, a research project which analyses the perception of citizens in the European Union and the impact of the EU cohesion policy. The study, which is supported by the EU research programme Horizon2020, will be finished in August 2019, but it already offers some new insights, which caught the researchers by surprise. To cite one, the fact that despite having an unclear geographical pattern, those countries that entered the EU in the first and second expansion vividly show a higher feeling of identity with the European project and awareness of the cohesion policy than the founding members.

Researchers from the seven countries taking part in Perceive are gathering on July 2 in Barcelona, at the Faculty of Economics and Business, in the yearly meeting for this project. UB lecturers Vicente Royuela and Enrique López-Bazo, lecturers from the Department of Econometrics, Statistics and Applied Economics and members of the UB unit that coordinates this research over the EU citizens' perceptions, comment on another unexpected result: “The fact that cohesion policy gets implemented to a specific area, or in a specific way does not have the same impact on the European identity than on the awareness they have of this policy, or on the citizensʼ personal experience with the benefits and costs of being part of the EU".

PERCEIVE includes a survey, curated by the University of Gothenburg, which asks about the European identity and other project-related concepts as well as information on income, jobs and political opinions. This survey was conducted with 17,147 people from fifteen EU member countries, with a special focus on nine European regionsExtremadura being one of them- which have been selected as notable case-studies.

The UB researchers used these data to analyse the perceptions of European citizens with a special emphasis on the spatial factor, in order to understand, among other things, whether there is a division between urban and rural environments. Regarding this issue, they found no trace of the expected rural/urban gap in many of the analysed perceptions, but there is proof that people living in big cities tend to support and know better about structural funds and the cohesion policy.

The UB researchers detected some notable differences across the EU areas regarding the awareness of the cohesion policy and knowledge of EU-funded projects. These are higher in Central European and Eastern Europe countries and the Mediterranean ones, and lower in Western European countries, mostly due the existence or inexistence of precise information on the projects that are carried out in the areas of the surveyed people.

The research team of the UB, of which the lecturers Jordi Suriñach and Rosina Moreno are also members, has worked on other issues of the project, some being more methodological ─such as the construction of an indicator of the citizenʼs feeling of identity with the European Union. They also carried out an evaluation of the cohesion policy in Extremadura during the period 2007-2013 which can be read in this article, and conducted a series of interviews with managers of regional policies in this territory. In short, the participation of the UB focused on the territorial analysis and the elements that are linked to the economic field.

The PERCEIVE project, coordinated by the University of Bologna, aims to give a response to issues such as whether European citizens know about the cohesion policy, or whether the EU informs about its policies properly. The aim is to improve communication among the different local and regional realities and to increase the relevance and efficiency of policies.