Finanziamento UE – NextGenerationEU PRIN 2022 "Whither Sovereignty? Italy and Pan-European Perspectives" PNRR M4C2 investimento 1.1 Avviso 104/2022

In our days, European societies appear cross-cut by two opposite pressures: one in favour of getting back control of powers with an emphasis on the state level and its borders, another in favour of open borders and the delegation of policy competence (especially in favour of the EU level playing the role of chief manager in crises). Associated with these two pressures we find, on the one hand, an increasingly frequent use of sovereignist claims in the political system. A sovereignist political upsurge has become widespread within society, calling for a return to an order where states take back control over policy, international interactions and the protection of the self-identified interests of the native population. On the other hand, we find a pressing need for European societies to share the burden of global shocks among the EU member states and to recognise a leading role for the EU in coordinating such efforts. It appears that a sense of insecurity within society can create demand for either EU initiatives or more chauvinistic solutions. But the causal relationship behind preference formation is not clear and the phenomenon remains, overall, under-investigated, not least because theory and concept building are still lacking. In a context where the values of sovereignty are increasingly reclaimed, and where they resonate strongly with many voters and are brought to the centre of political competition, our analysis sets out systematically to investigate if a link exists between demand (public opinion and media) and supply (parties and their leaders) regarding issues pertaining to sovereignty. By examining the connection between party discourses, citizens’ preferences and media coverage, our approach goes beyond an in-depth description of the use of sovereignty claims and aims to investigate the relationship between the demand and the supply sides of the political system to understand whether parties and the public are both mobilised on issues regarding sovereignty. A novelty of our approach rests in a triangulation of data from various sources (public opinion surveys, social and news media, expert and elite surveys, party manifestos). To the best of our knowledge these have never been used together to test a set of hypotheses on a wide array of factors expected to explain sovereignty claims, as we aim to do with our work. We will carry out a longitudinal analysis where the pre-pandemic context (permeated by the impact of multiple crises, such as the Eurocrisis, the immigration crisis and Brexit) is compared to the post-pandemic context marked by the impact of the SARS-COV2 emergency.