Explaining State Behavior in EU Redistributive Politics

One of the main objectives of the European Union’s budget is to operate as a redistributive mechanism to contrast the cross-national and cross-regional inequalities created by the common market. Despite the fact that the principle of ‘juste retour’ has traditionally limited the redistributive capacity of the EU budget, the net fiscal position of member states (what they pay to the EU budget minus what they receive from it) is remarkably diverse, and has changed over the years. In this paper, I investigate state behaviour in EU redistributive politics. More specifically, I seek to explain how, and why, the net fiscal position of each member state toward the rest of the EU has changed over the years. Using a multi-level model of analysis, I study the impact of a number of national and EU-level political and economic variables on the willingness of member states to contribute to the EU budget more than they receive from it. The analysis is based on a novel dataset containing the operating budgetary balance (OBB) of all the member states during the timeframe 1979-2014.