Regional Inequality, Subnational Identity and Support for European Social Policy

The European Union currently lacks a genuine European layer of social security, which could help citizens in coping with the adverse consequences of unexpected economic crises, such as unemployment. Policy makers have been proposing to establish a European Unemployment Risk-Sharing (EURS) initiative. While governments remain divided on the implementation of any such scheme, the opinion of citizens vis-à-vis alternative solutions remains to be fully explored. In this paper, we use a conjoint experiment to study the relationship between regional inequality, subnational identity and support for EURS in 13 European member states. In particular, we model the socioeconomic context in which citizens are immersed to gauge how regional economic factors such as economic growth, income inequality and unemployment impact individual-level preferences towards EURS. We also examine to what extent subnational identities and support for regional and separatist parties mediate these relationships. To do so, we exploit the nested structure of a conjoint experiment fielded in 13 European member states in 2018, which is representative at NUTS 1 level. Thanks to the regional representativeness of the dataset, we can capture the interaction between individual and sociotropic influences on preferences towards EU-level social policy to a level of detail which is unprecedented in the literature.