The EU as a savior and a saint? Corruption and public support for redistribution

Abstract

While the European Union is plagued by considerable social and economic inequality, not least in the wake of both the enlargement of the Union and the financial crises, we know surprisingly little about the sources of public support for redistribution and the EU:s most significant tool for reducing inequalities: Cohesion Policy. We suggest that, while identity, ideology and utilitarian concerns may motivate support for international redistribution, such support is highly contingent on perceptions of domestic corruption. Using unique and newly collected survey data, we show that perceptions of domestic corruption increase support for within-EU redistribution but only in contexts where the quality of government is low and public service delivery deficient. Perceptions of corruption have no such effect in contexts where the quality of government is high. We conclude that perceptions of domestic corruption will drive support for Cohesion Policy in contexts where the EU can be seen as both a potential savior andrelative to domestic governmenta saint. We discuss implications for further EU integration.

EU Cohesion Policy can't buy me love? Exploring the regional determinants of EU image

“…Thus, perhaps EU money can't buy EU love, but at least it makes negative attitudes towards the EU less likely. By pointing to this relationship, we add to the growing body of research on the regional impacts of Cohesion Policy on the citizens' perceptions of the EU (Bauhr & Charron, 2019;Borz et al, 2018), confirming the potential of Cohesion Policy to create a less negative sentiment towards the EU.…”

Mapping citizens' identification with the EU

“…By exploiting the rich information of the PERCEIVE survey (Bauhr & Charron, , ) the determinants of EU identity and individual identification have been discussed from an empirical point of view by Lopez‐Bazo and Royuela (). They identify and group the main influences: Political capital, Ideology, Socio‐economic context, Country level variables.…”

“…For building the model we rely on data from a sample survey developed within the PERCEIVE project (Bauhr & Charron, , ) and a dataset that brings together information from several official secondary sources at regional level (NUTS 1 and NUTS 2) in a panel format (Charron, ).…”

“…Our paper contributes to this stream of research by introducing a novel probabilistic model for the assessment of citizens' identification at individual and regional level in order to discover regional patterns of citizens' identification. In particular, we present and discuss the results of a model, IdentEU (Aiello et al, ), which builds on a rich set of information collected with structured interviews (Bauhr & Charron, ) and complemented by secondary data at regional level (e.g., from Eurostat). This provides the opportunity to more deeply consider the socio‐economic and political determinants of citizens' identification with the EU project.…”

“…In particular, we present and discuss the results of a model, IdentEU (Aiello et al, 2018), which builds on a rich set of information collected with structured interviews (Bauhr & Charron, 2019) and complemented by secondary data at regional level (e.g., from Eurostat). This provides the opportunity to more deeply consider the socio-economic and political determinants of citizens' identification with the EU project.…”