The political bond in Europe: a research agenda

The normative foundations required by the EU have been cast variously in the literature in terms of an economic, social, constitutional or cultural bond. This essay proposes a shift in focus to what may be called the political bond, understood as people’s sense of sharing in each other’s predicaments and fate. Although rarely discussing it explicitly, existing approaches generally imply that this bond is uniform across issue-areas. Some of the basic insights of political psychology suggest that this may be an unsustainable assumption, and research will be needed to investigate whether populations perceive the political bond more widely in some issue domains than others, a finding which would have implications for institutional design.