The increasing complexity and heterogeneity of contemporary societies represent a major challenge to European nation-states. Their boundaries of social rights, political participation and ethnic belonging used to be highly congruent. In the past few decades, however, globalization, European integration and mass immigration have eroded this congruence.
Thus, while for a long time the nation state was seen as the natural reference point for social solidarity, policy makers focusing on redistribution are now facing a dilemma. In view of increased international interdependence, the call for supranational redistribution has become more vocal. At the same time, we witness claims for more fiscal independence at the subnational level. In short, recent transformations of the state have unsettled our boundaries of social solidarity.
Therefore, this paper seeks to understand people’s readiness to redistribute locally, nationally, or supranationally. In particular, it analyses how people’s collective identities and generalized trust, influence their preferences for redistribution at the local, national and European level. It also aims at understanding whether redistributional behaviour is dependent on contextual factors, such national frames and decentralization.
To this aim, we conduct laboratory experiments using nested public goods provision games, dictator games, and third party dictator games. The experiments assess if and to what extent people prefer to redistribute their endowment at the local rather than the national or the European level, and how the amount of redistributed money changes if they are forced to redistribute at a certain level. Experiments will be conducted in two locations in Germany (Berlin and Munich) and in two locations in the United Kingdom (Oxford and Edinburgh).
