What difference does the framing of a crisis make to European Union solidarity?
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165231184641 |
| Author | Federico M Ferrara,Waltraud Schelkle,Zbigniew Truchlewski |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
What difference does the
framing of a crisis make to
European Union solidarity?
Federico M Ferrara
London School of Economics, European Institute, London, UK
Waltraud Schelkle
London School of Economics, European Institute, London, UK;
European University Institute, SPS Department and Rpbert
Schuman Centre, Florence, Italy
Zbigniew Truchlewski
London School of Economics, European Institute, London, UK
Abstract
Does the framing of crises shape public support for inter-state solidarity? We focus on
three dimensions that have been salient in the characterisation of European Union crises
and may affect public support for solidarity more generally: (a) how country-specificor
common a crisis is; (b) whether policymakers are seen as responsible for the crisis or
not; and (c) how existential or manageable the threat posed by a crisis appears. We
employ a pre-registered factorial vignette experiment conducted in 15 European
Union countries to assess how characterising a hypothetical crisis affects voter support
for fiscal and financial solidarity. Our results show that exposure to different crises
frames shapes public support for risk-sharing in the European Union. Changes in solidar-
istic attitudes vary significantly with the means of fiscal risk-sharing proposed.
Keywords
Crisis, collective action, experimental methods, public opinion, solidarity
Corresponding author:
Waltraud Schelkle, European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street,
London WC2 2AE, UK.
Email: w.schelkle@lse.ac.uk
Article
European Union Politics
2023, Vol. 24(4) 666–683
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165231184641
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Introduction
Does the framing of crises shape public support for inter-state solidarity? This is a
question for federations or compound polities generally, but nowhere as pressing as
in the European Union (EU) after a long decade of crises. In the wake of the euro
area (EA) crisis, many scholars argued that the policy response was strongly influ-
enced by the way in which the crisis was portrayed, paving the way for fiscal austerity
and labour market reforms (e.g., Blyth, 2013; Schmidt, 2021). An initial frame was
that the crisis was in essence fiscal, notably due to mismanagement by successive
Greek governments, quietly tolerated by the Council despite warnings from Eurostat
(European Commission, 2010: 12–16). The adjustment programmes treated the
crisis largely as a country-specific matter, for which entrenched national policies
were responsible and which did not pose an existential threat to the currency union
if contagion could be reined in (Schelkle, 2017: 195). Scholars suggest that this
public account of the EA crisis reduced the potential for solidaristic reforms, such
as introducing a joint debt instrument or giving means-tested transfers (Matthijs and
McNamara, 2015).
The frame of a country-specific, containable crisis did not gain traction during the cor-
onavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. There were attempts to renew allegations
of moral hazard, notably when the Dutch finance minister insinuated that the Spanish
government may have insufficiently prepared for the pandemic (Khan, 2020). Leading
politicians, experts, and the media in Europe engaged in a very public debate about
the crisis diagnosis until a consensus on a common, existential threat for which
nobody was responsible emerged (Ferrera et al., 2021; Truchlewski et al., 2021).
Scholars noted that an initial reflex to close borders and control exports in mid-March
was followed by a surprising willingness to extend cross-border fiscal solidarity
(Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2021). However, so far, few contributions specify how
voters respond to different perceptions of a crisis and what forms of solidarity they
would support.
In this paper, we ask whether and which crisis frames affect public support towards
fiscal integration and financial solidarity in the EU. We try to identify, theoretically
and empirically, a pattern that can account for variation between crises and what
follows in terms of political support for tangible solidarity. Theoretically, we discuss
how collective action theory can rationalise why these dimensions are relevant for the
supply side of crisis management. From the vantage point of EU policy-makers, our
research question can be formulated as under which circumstances are citizens amenable
to inter-state solidarity? We hypothesise that three traits of a crisis affect public support
for solidarity between EU member states: (a) how common or country-specific a crisis is;
(b) how attributable or not the crisis is to policymakers’decisions in the past; and (c) how
existential or containable the threat posed by the crisis appears to be for the EU. These
traits matter for the collective action problems that policymakers have to solve in order
to manage a crisis, as we will outline in the theory section. Policymakers reveal their diag-
noses of a crisis when they negotiate collective responses to an emergency and commu-
nicate it to the public, through the crisis measures themselves, through public statements
Ferrara et al. 667
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