Title:	Citizens’ Reactions to European Integration Compared
Authors:	Sophie Duchesne Elizabeth Frazer Florence Haegel Virginie Van Ingelgom
Keywords:	Overlooking Europe
Issue Date:	2013
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	The analysis and arguments in this book are based on data gathered from 24 focus groups, 8 conducted in each of Paris, Oxford and Brussels in the period January–June 2006. It was impossible not to begin, during the fieldwork period itself, to analyse the class and national differences that were at the heart of our research design. In Brussels group members showed strikingly high levels of sociability – invariably, they began immediately to converse and to find out about their fellow group members’ identities. They tended to achieve a level of group solidarity with no difficulty – checking that each other was able to get home at the end, and offering lifts. They also exhibited, by any standards, strikingly high levels of knowledge of multi-level politics. Working-class participants engaged in serious discussions of voting systems and appropriate distributions of competence. We didn’t know, and still don’t, how to explain Belgians’ particular competence in discussing European integration. Is it the quality of citizenship education in schools? A public political culture that is more transparent about political structures than the other two? In any case, the effect was evident at the time of the fieldwork and is borne out in our subsequent close analysis of the data. The Oxford group members both exhibited very low levels of acquaintance with any concrete information regarding Europe and also tended to be troubled by this. From one group, members contacted the research team afterwards, to ask for answers to the questions we had put – and in one man’s case, a reading list – as they were so upset at it being made clear how little they knew. One problem we detected in these groups was that members who did have concrete knowledge found it very difficult to speak – they anticipated that their fellow group members wouldn’t like a show-off, we think; there is something of a stigma in some sections of British culture about any display of knowledge. The discussions in the Oxford groups are measurably shorter than in Brussels and Paris – the moderator was at times doing her best to string things out until the refreshments were on the table for the break. And researchers in conversation analysis might find some interesting data pertaining to the structure, dynamics and management of silences from our Oxford corpus.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/51336
ISBN:	978-1-137-29726-6
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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