Supranationalism Decision Making for Spanish Citizens and its Relation to Personal Variables

A crucial issue in the European Union (EU) is which policies should be regulated by EU and which ones by national governments.
Given this situation it is interesting to study the citizens’ preference for the level of political decision making. The interest
of the paper is mainly empirical, which consists in the creation of a measure for supranationalism decision making from different
measured policies and to study how personal variables affect the level of political decision. A combination of Item response
theory (IRT) and structural equation modeling (SEM) will be used. IRT is useful to discover whether a cumulative scale for
different policies exists, and SEM will be used as validity of the supranationalism scale. Multiple group Confirmatory Factor
analysis taking into account invariance tests will be used to compare the differences within gender, age, education and political
trust with supranationalism scale. A whole model combining all these predictors and the supranationalism scale can be done
using multiple input multiple cause-MIMIC models. The application is based on Spanish data from the European Social Survey.
Differences in education and age on the level of political decision making are found. The combination of IRT and SEM methods
it of great interest in the case is the researcher wants to fulfill both goals, creating the construct for supranationalism
and validation of the model.