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INTRODUCTION
1. In the context of the French and Dutch referenda in which votes in those countries rejected the proposed constitution for the EU, the European Commission's Vice-President Margot Wallström and Scotland's First Minister announced the Building a Bridge project in October 2005. The aim is to look at how the experiences of Scotland, as a region with legislative powers and a new system of government, might help the EU connect better with its citizens. To that end, this project was included in the European Commission's White Paper on a European Communication Policy.
2. This is the second of three evidence review papers prepared to support the Building a Bridge project. The review process involved three key steps: consultation with key agencies and academics, an analysis of the existing literature using specific search terms, and finally, disaggregating Scottish data from surveys carried out across European member states such as the European Social Survey and Eurobarometer.
3. This paper begins with a brief discussion of people's trust in political institutions, then examines in detail people's attitudes towards Europe, their knowledge of the EU, views on integration and the extent to which they claim to have a European identity.
4. The paper compares the views of people in Scotland on these issues with those of people in Britain as a whole in order to assess the extent to which the evidence supports a distinct Scottish perspective on Europe. The paper serves to set the media-tracking and case study chapters of the Building a Bridge report within the broader context of awareness and attitudes to Europe.
5. Given the overall project's context of the current period of reflection and the issues set out in the Communication White paper, the review considers whether there are limitations in understanding citizens' outlook. Using nation and sub-national analysis, it includes a brief analysis of five key factors that affect people's views of the EU: sex, education, location, identity and age. The question of whether young people have a distinct outlook on European matters is the subject of Evidence Review Paper Three.
6. The review concludes that variations in each of these individual-level factors are not as great as national-level variation, i.e. that differences between citizens, eg along skills level, are not nearly as great as differences between nation states.
7. The final part of the review touches on the challenges that are inherent in communicating Europe. These relate to a knowledge challenge and a more political ownership challenge. The review assesses people's knowledge of the EU, taking each of the EU institutions in turn as well as outlining the way that citizens have said they would like to receive information. The paper draws to close with a discussion on the extent to which both individual citizens and politicians feel a sense of ownership of EU policies.
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