Comparing deputies’ and voters’ support for Europe: The case of Portugal

In this article, we compared and tried to explain deputies’ and voters’ perceptions about various dimensions of European integration. The general assertion that the political elite’s perceptions tend to be more pro-integration finds some support in our analysis, but the results indicate this difference − in the Portuguese case − is smaller than has been suggested in the mainstream literature. The data also showed citizens are more in favour of enlargement than their representatives are. We also observe these assertions hold true only for the deputies of the three parties with experience of government. Finally, we try to explain the divide between a voter and their deputy’s position on European integration, and we observed that the main explanatory variable for a narrow divide is political interest and information (which also explains the voters’ probability of having an opinion).