Discourses of Globalisation and European Integration in the United Kingdom and Ireland, 2004-2005

The principal objective of the research was to survey and map elite political attitudes to globalisation, European integration and the relationship between the two. Explicitly designed as a pilot study for a broader multi-country and multi-language European comparative analysis, the focus of the project was restricted to the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland, two countries that are particularly well suited to a comparative analysis of this kind due to their common language, their common institutional origins and the structural similarities in their political economies.<br> <br> The research was informed by the following key questions: <ul><li>how policy-makers perceive globalisation and European integration (including the relationship between them)</li><li>whether distinctive discourses of globalisation, European integration and the relationship between the two can be identified, how pervasive the concepts are, and to what extent they are conserved between cases and, within cases, between political parties, civil servants and politicians, and front- and back-benchers</li><li>whether such discourses are national in character or are party-political factors the principal determinants of attitudes towards globalisation and European integration</li><li>whether there are disparities between policy-makers' attitudes towards globalisation and European integration, as revealed in survey-based research and the official/public appeal to such discourses</li></ul>The research was conducted via a postal questionnaire, which was sent to all Members of Parliament (MPs) in the UK, all Members of the Dail (parliament) in Ireland, and 1,000 UK and Irish civil servants. This consisted of closed questions with identical scalar answer formats that reflected a range of perspectives regarding globalisation and European integration. The postal survey was backed by detailed discourse analysis of policy documents and a small number of semi-structured interviews with senior policy-makers from both countries (only the postal survey responses are included in the dataset).<br> <br> <br>