What guides citizen support for redistributive EU measures as a response to COVID-19: Justice attitudes, self-interest or support for European integration?
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165231166284 |
| Author | Doris Unger,Jürgen Sirsch,Daniel Stockemer,Arne Niemann |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
What guides citizen
support for redistributive
EU measures as a response
to COVID-19: Justice
attitudes, self-interest or
support for European
integration?
Doris Unger
Department of Political Science, University of Mainz, Germany
Jürgen Sirsch
Department of Political Science, University of Mainz, Germany
Daniel Stockemer
School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada
Arne Niemann
Department of Political Science, University of Mainz, Germany
Abstract
In 2020/2021, the EU and its member states had to tackle the largest shock of the
twenty-first century yet, the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 led to an unprecedented
health and economic crisis. In this article, we analyse public opinion on redistributive EU
measures based on an original survey in Austria, Germany and Italy and ask whether EU
citizens support a common aid package, common debt and redistribution to those
countries that are economically most in need. Testing the influence of three explanatory
concepts –self-interest, justice attitudes and general support of European integration –
we find that all three explanatory concepts have predictive power. However, we find
Corresponding author:
Daniel Stockemer, Schoolof Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 120 University Private, Ottawa, ON, K1N
6N5, Canada.
Email: Daniel.stockemer@uottawa.ca
Article
European Union Politics
2023, Vol. 24(3) 578–600
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165231166284
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
stronger effects on support for EU-level redistribution for citizens’instrumental calcula-
tions concerning whether their country benefits from EU aid, and on general support
for EU integration, than for justice attitudes.
Keywords
COVID-19, EU, justice attitudes, latent EU support, rational choice, redistribution
Introduction
An example of a truly transboundary crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world in early
2020. As of 7 December 2022, more than 646 million people across the globe have been
infected and over 6.6 million have died (John Hopkins University, 2022). The COVID-19
pandemic is not only thelargest health crisis for the European Union(EU) in recent times,
but its socio-economicimpact was also significant: GDP in the EU dropped by about 6% in
2020 (European Commission, 2022: 24). Employment in the Euro area contractedsharply,
with 5.2 million fewer people employed in the second quarter of 2020 than at the end of
2019 (a 3.2% decline). Meanwhile, unemployment increased less drastically (by 1.2 per-
centage pointsbetween February and October 2020), reflectingthe large-scale job retention
schemes that reached unprecedented levels across the EU (see, e.g.,Anderton et al., 2021).
The COVID-19 crisis has been a test for solidarity in the EU. Not only did the member
states express solidarity by providing aid to other EU countries in need, but the EU has
also taken extraordinary measures to tackle the crisis: it has agreed on a substantial recov-
ery package that redistributes funds to the most severely affected countries while taking
on common debts, thus breaking an important taboo that especially northern member
states had staunchly defended during the European sovereign debt (Eurozone) crisis.
Hence, the EU recovery package enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic also provides
an opportunity to investigate determinants of citizens’willingness to support cross-border
redistribution among EU member states in the unique context of a transboundary health
and economic crisis (see Bauhr and Charron, 2021; Baute and de Ruijter, 2021; Bobzien
and Kalleitner, 2021; Goldberg et al., 2021).
We focus on attitudes towards redistribution drawing on the case of the EU rescue
package during the COVID-19 crisis. As independent variables, we concentrate on
three explanatory concepts, which are justice attitudes, Euroscepticism and perceived
self-interest. Our results are relevant for gauging the degree to which the EU is slowly
becoming more like a ‘normal’political system where citizens evaluate policy at least
partially based on long-standing distributive ideologies and perceived self-interest –
like in the national political arena –or whether citizens’view of the EU is predominantly
determined by their image of the EU. This is important for assessing the democratic
quality of the EU and could also provide hints at the future direction of European inte-
gration, especially with respect to the idea of a Social Europe.
We study the determinants of support for the EU rescue package through an original
survey conducted in Austria, Germany and Italy in December 2020. Our three dependent
variables are the degree to which citizen support: (a) a common EU package to alleviate
Unger et al. 579
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