The Impact of the Refugee Crisis
on Polish Perception of the European Union
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Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
Publication date: 2020-04-29
Polish Sociological Review 2020;209(1):23-40
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ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the effects of the migration crisis of 2015 on Polish attitudes to the European
Union. Superficially, there seems to have been no significant impact: even though the migration crisis resulted
in hitherto unprecedented tensions between Poland and the EU, as well as a robust anti-immigrant turn in Polish
public opinion, this crisis had little or no effect on the standard survey gauges of EU favorability in Poland.
However, based on a comparison between the results of pre- and post-crisis Eurobarometer surveys (EB82.3 and
EB87.3), our analysis demonstrates that while the overall perception of the EU became only slightly less favorable
between 2014 and 2017, a substantial shift in the structure of public opinion did occur. Concerns over immigration
were not associated with perception of the EU before the crisis but became dominant predictors after 2015.
FUNDING
This work was supported by the grant, “Reflecting Europeanisation: Cumulative Databases of Cross-Country Surveys as a Tool for Monitoring European Public Opinion Trends” from the National Science Centre Poland (grant no. 2018/31/B/HS6/00403).