The honest, the efficient, and the hardworking: What stereotypes Europe needs to increase support for redistribution

Abstract

Speakers: Adina Akbik Christina Toenshoff Discussant: Björn Bremer In the past decade, cultural stereotypes have often been present in the political and media discourse on European Union (EU) decision-making. The euro crisis split the EU into Northern ‘saints’ and Southern ‘sinners’ to capture cultural attitudes towards public spending1. The Covid-19 pandemic led to the emergence of the ‘frugal four’ (Austria, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden), a group of countries that used a self-ascribed adjective to signal virtue against the spendthrift countries of the South. Yet despite the frequency of cultural stereotypes in political rhetoric and media coverage, we know little about their prevalence in public opinion or in connection with citizen preferences on EU policy. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between national stereotypes and public opinion on EU economic redistribution. We focus on national stereotypes as opposed to cultural stereotypes for the sake of specificity and recognisability, e.g. the lazy Greeks, the efficient Germans, the corrupt Romanians, and so forth. We test the prevalence of 25 popular stereotypes through an observational survey conducted in four countries representative of regional differences in the EU: Germany (west), Italy (south), Romania (east), and Sweden (north). Our findings show that the more positive stereotypes people hold about the work ethic, trustworthiness, and generosity of other European nationalities, the higher their support for EU economic redistribution. By contrast, negative stereotypes do not have the opposite expected effect. Our work thus adds a yet unexplored dimension to the extensive public opinion research on EU policy preferences.