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, Jürgen Sirsch, Daniel Stockemer and Arne Niemann
Additional contact information
Doris Unger: Department of Political Science, 153616University of Mainz, Germany
Jürgen Sirsch: Department of Political Science, 153616University of Mainz, Germany
Daniel Stockemer: School of Political Studies, 6363University of Ottawa, Canada
Arne Niemann: Department of Political Science, 9182University of Mainz, Germany

European Union Politics, 2023, vol. 24, issue 3, 578-600

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 stronger effects on support for EU-level redistribution for citizens’ instrumental calculations 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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14651165231166284 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:24:y:2023:i:3:p:578-600

DOI: 10.1177/14651165231166284

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().