Like a magnifier, Spotlight focuses its analyses on public opinion reactions to the most recent issues at stake in the European political agenda, showing how they affect European democracy. Economic crisis, migration, climate change – just to cite some well-known issues – represent new challenges for the European Institutions both in terms of policy-making and public-opinion demands. How are those issues perceived by European citizens? And, to what extent do they influence public attitudes toward the Union and its legitimacy? Those questions are at the core of the Spotlight project. It is addressed to two main targets of users: 1) a wide category of people interested in politics, including stakeholders, journalists, politicians, functionaries, students and in general all common citizens interested in understanding public opinion; and 2) social scientists studying public opinion and European democracy. In order to reach the first target, Spotlight will present periodic reports on mainstream public-opinion debates, showing their consequences on attitudes toward Europe and EU institutions. Within this field, the project will prefer a synthetic and clear style to technical/scientific language, using simple tools to show results. Moreover, the Spotlight project will gradually implement its contribution to the scientific community by providing a software-based collection of Eurobarometers’ questions – and later on including all possible related surveys – divided by issues. This tool will, it is hoped, represent the larger experiment of data merging per topic. Through it, every investigator may use variables of different databases both in a diachronic and spatial perspective.

 

 

Download the Spotlight reports:

 

Spotlight n.1 

Spotlight n.2  

Spotlight n.3