Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The EU is confronted with a serious challenge to its legitimacy. More and more citizens have come to support Eurosceptic parties, and one Member State has even turned its back on the EU altogether after British citizens voted to leave the Union. The EU is, thus, in need of reforms that might improve its legitimacy in the eyes of European citizens. However, there is surprisingly little research on which reforms could improve citizens’ support for the Union. To fill this gap, this chapter presents novel data from an online survey of 12,000 citizens in six EU Member States: Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Spain. Based on survey questions and a conjoint experiment, the chapter explores how six attributes of EU decision-making, covering three key reform dimensions, impact on citizens’ EU support. The empirical results show a relatively strong status-quo orientation in areas that touch upon the authority dimension. Reforms that change the balance of power between the EU and its Member States are likely to be met with public opposition. Conversely, the data reveal widespread support for more citizen participation and more transparency in EU decision-making processes. Citizens also place high importance on the capacity of EU policies to solve problems, especially on issues that have a clear transnational focus and could be construed as protecting Europeans from outside threats. Reforms that could strengthen these characteristics are the sweet spot of EU reform: they are likely to improve citizens’ perceptions of EU democratic legitimacy without eliciting major conflicts between different groups.</jats:p>