Why support International redistribution? Corruption and public support for aid in the eurozone
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116518757702 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Why support International
redistribution? Corruption
and public support for aid
in the eurozone
Monika Bauhr
The Quality of Government (QoG) institute, Department of
Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
Nicholas Charron
The Quality of Government (QoG) institute, Department of
Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
Abstract
What factors explain public support for international redistribution? While the
European Union has sent billions of taxpayers’ money to over indebted euro countries
in an attempt to avoid an economic collapse, these transfers have encountered fierce
resistance among both donor and recipient constituents. However, we know surpris-
ingly little about why citizens support or oppose redistribution within the EU.
This paper suggests that domestic levels of corruption and institutional quality may
be one of the most important explanations for the great variation in public support
for financial assistance, bailouts and aid. Using recent European Elections Survey data
merged with data on regional level quality of government, we show that the effects of
institutional quality are consistently stronger than macro-economic factors, including
economic development, inequality or levels of public debt. We find strong evidence that
citizens in low corrupt contexts are more likely to support financial assistance to fellow
member states. The results have implications for future challenges in securing public
support for EU economic integration as well as for our understanding of how and why
corruption undermines society’s collective action capacity.
Keywords
Corruption, democracy, European Union, financial assistance, redistribution, bailouts,
public opinion, institutional trust, EU identity, taxation
European Union Politics
2018, Vol. 19(2) 233–254
!The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116518757702
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Corresponding author:
Nicholas Charron, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Spra
¨ngkullsgatan 19, 41123
Go
¨teborg, Sweden.
Email: Nicholas.charron@pol.gu.se
Introduction
In 2009, the European financial system was hit by one of the worst debt crises of
our time – the Eurozone crisis. The financial bailouts after the 2009 economic crises
represent one of the most massive cross border transfers of resources in recent
times, and billions of taxpayers’ money was sent to over indebted Euro countries.
1
While several experts view these bailout funds as necessary to avoid economic
collapse, this redistribution of wealth has encountered fierce resistance among
wide sections of the European public and many European Union (EU) citizens
strongly oppose the use of their tax-money to help other EU member states in times
of crisis. Despite an impressive body of scholarly work on the determinants of
support for domestic redistribution (e.g. Jæger, 2006; Svallfors, 2013) and an emer-
ging body of literature on public support for international redistribution and for-
eign aid (Bauhr et al., 2013; Milner and Tingley, 2013; Paxton and Knack, 2012),
we know surprisingly little about the factors that explain public support for inter-
national redistribution within the EU.
This article investigates the explanatory power of three major types of explan-
ations for support for inter-EU financial assistance: macro-economic, political/
institutional and individual level explanations. Traditionally, economic variables
and particularly macro-economic (or ‘sociotropic’) performance has been seen as
one of the most central determinant of public support for financial assistance and
redistribution more broadly, largely overlooking the importance of the perform-
ance of government institutions and specifically, their level of impartiality and
corruption. This article suggests that the quality of government (QoG) institutions
and levels of corruption, may be one of the most important explanations for vari-
ations in public support for financial assistance to other EU countries. Citizens
living in countries with well working domestic institutions support international
redistribution to larger extent than citizens of countries with dysfunctional domes-
tic institutions, and the explanatory power of the quality of institutions may be
more important than macro-economic explanations, such as GDP/capita, income
inequality or the level of sovereign debt.
We posit that two separate but highly interrelated factors explain why domestic
institutions influence support for inter-EU redistribution. First, as suggested by a
growing literature in such varying fields as health policy, environmental policy or
the stability of public finances, the quality of domestic institutions are important
for the supply of public goods, with implications for citizens’ trust in the govern-
ment’s ability to collect taxes and produce and provide such goods (Rothstein
et al., 2012; Svallfors, 2013). Citizens living in countries with dysfunctional gov-
ernment institutions would thereby have experience of money being siphoned off
from the provision of public services to the pockets of government officials, and
therefore fundamental distrust the redistributive capacity of governments, domes-
tically as well as internationally. Furthermore, the QoG and level of corruption
influence the demand for public goods provision. Clientelist and corrupt systems
increase demand for particularistic payoffs rather than public goods and program-
matic policies (Bauhr and Charron 2017; Nichter and Peress 2017; Stokes 2005),
234 European Union Politics 19(2)
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