Theresa Kuhn has co-authored the paper with Hector Solaz and Erika van Elsas.
Abstract
The political turf wars surrounding the European sovereign debt crisis have underlined both the high political relevance and the fragile state of transnational solidarity in the European Union. This paper combines evidence from an original laboratory experiment conducted in the United Kingdom and Germany and from cross-national survey data covering the EU-28 to study transnational solidarity among European citizens. More precisely, we analyse the determinants of individuals’ actual willingness to share across borders and public support for institutional redistribution. Our analyses provide strong support for the hypothesis that transnational solidarity in the EU is structured by cosmopolitan vs nationalist attitudes: Experimental participants who subscribe to cosmopolitan values put their money where their mouth is when deciding whether to share resources with other Europeans. They do not discriminate between national and European recipients, while people with less cosmopolitan worldviews do so. Our paper has important implications for the political economy of the European sovereign debt crisis and for research on support for foreign aid.
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