Two approaches to the assessment of opinion congruence: Elite-mass gaps on the EU issue in France and in the United Kingdom

Since the Maastricht Treaty and even more so since the contemporary overlapping crises, the EU has increasingly entered national politics as a bone of contention. This thesis inquires into the alleged existence of a mass-elite discrepancy as regards attitudes towards European integration, with special reference to France and the United Kingdom. To that end, the research design firstly builds on the body of literature devoted to "issue congruence" and on the mass and elite survey data recently gathered by the EUEngage project. Drawing on a general item as well as several specific ones, on objective elite self-positioning as well as the subjective perceptions of citizens, it carries out a far-reaching assessment of EU issue congruence based on an unprecedentedly comprehensive array of measures. Secondly, it endeavours to devise an alternative appraisal strategy based on the identification of a number of possible interpretations of the EU. Such list of "frames" is applied as a common coding structure to textual data, collected at elite level through public discourse and at mass level through a small-scale online survey.