Poor versus rich countries: a gap in public attitudes towards fiscal solidarity in the EU

Abstract

Existing research has primarily focused on the role of utility and identity in shaping individuals' European Union (EU) preferences. This article argues that macroeconomic context is a crucial predictor of attitudes towards transnational financial assistance, which has been omitted from previous analyses. Using data from the 2014 European Election Studies (EES) Voter Study for 28 EU member states, this article demonstrates that citizens living in poorer EU countries are less willing to support fiscal solidarity than their counterparts in more affluent countries. Country affluence serves as a heuristic, moderating the relationship between individual-level utility and identity considerations and willingness to show solidarity to member states with economic difficulties. When a country does not fare well economically, citizens' views on providing help to others remain negative, irrespective of individual-level utilitarian and identity considerations. Our findings have implications for understanding the decision-making calculus underlying preference formation.

In This Together? Support for European Fiscal Integration in the COVID-19 Crisis

“…Despite the increasing success of Eurosceptic forces, there is some degree of public support for risk-sharing and solidarity among Europeans. Even though Europeans are more inclined to show solidarity towards co-nationals than towards citizens of other member states (Lahusen andGrasso, 2018, Kuhn andKamm, 2019), there is in principle widespread support for some form of international and European solidarity (Gerhards et al 2019;Ferrera and Burrelli 2019;Vasilopoulou and Talving, 2020). Yet public support for European solidarity is not unconditional.…”

“…On the one hand, there is mounting empirical evidence that citizens are reluctant to support cross-national risk-sharing (Bechtel et al, 2014;Beramendi and Stegmueller, 2020). On the other hand, a large body of research shows that there is lingering potential for public support for EU solidarity, especially in times of crisis (Gerhards et al 2019;Kuhn and Kamm, 2018;Vasilopoulou and Talving, 2020). How can we make sense of these inconclusive findings in support of risk-sharing and solidarity in the EU?…”

Public support for the European solidarity deal in EU debtor states: the case of Greece

“…Taking this deal as our point of departure, we venture to analyze the perspective of voters in debtor states. To date, previous research has mainly focused on voters' perspective on tax-payer money supporting other EU nations (for instance Gerhards et al 2019;Vasilopoulou and Talving 2020;Verhaegen 2018). Only a few attempts have been made to analyze debtor state citizens' perspective on the European solidarity deal at the time of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis (see for instance Walter et al 2018).…”

“…Even though public support for intra-EU solidarity policies has been intensively studied over the past decade, studies on citizens' agency in the European solidarity deal have focused mainly on public backing for providing monetary bailouts. In other words, the literature has investigated under which conditions citizens are willing to grant financial aid to indebted states (see for instance Bechtel, Hainmueller, and Margalit 2014;Kuhn, Solaz, and Van Elsas 2018;Lahusen and Grasso 2018;Vasilopoulou and Talving 2020;Verhaegen 2018). In contrast, public endorsement of the European solidarity deal -and specifically of the conditions attached to it -within the debtor states has been much less investigated (see for instance Walter et al 2018).…”

Fiscal solidarity: The conditional role of political knowledge

“…In addition, Beramendi (2007) argues that support for European fiscal redistribution depends on the configuration of resources and inequality at the national level. Vasilopoulou and Talving (2020) argue, for example, that the macro-economic context ‘serves as a heuristic shaping the extent to which citizens are willing to share resources’. The poorer the country, the less its citizens consider fiscal solidarity ‘as a collective responsibility, rather as primarily as the obligation of richer countries’ (Vasilopoulou and Talving, 2020: 2).…”