Is the EU influencing the quality of life? Let people have their say!

In recent years many important events have affected the EU political and economic stage: a new common currency, enlargements occurred in three waves, a huge economic crisis and a country’s request to exit the EU, just to cite a few. These events have deeply contributed to change the citizens’ attitude towards the EU and the perception of the influence of the EU on their quality of life. The present work aims at analyzing if the EU is seen positively or negatively by its citizens with regard to their quality of life. This analysis is carried out in two-steps via (i) a nonlinear principal component analysis to extract an indicator measuring citizens’ evaluation about how much the EU influences their quality of life, and (ii) a multilevel model to take into account some individual or country-specific factors affecting this perception. Specific attention is given to national differences.