Preferences for Redistribution Across EU Member States: Perceptions, Self-Interest, and Identities

How do citizens form attitudes towards international redistribution? What kind of economic and non-economic factors play a role? Previous research has highlighted that social dispositions like cosmopolitanism rather than individual economic status explain support for EU redistribution. By drawing on a cross-national survey experiment, the paper aims at disentangling the causal roles of individuals’ economic positions, their sociotropic concerns and declared identities. In particular, we elicit individual beliefs on one's relative position in the EU income distribution as well as on the relative position of one's member state’s average income in the EU. We provide some respondents with our estimate of their actual position in the income distribution (based on their reported income), as well as their member state's true position. We then measure the willingness to redistribute between individuals at the European level using survey items as well as a behavioural outcome. We expect to show that the impact of economic considerations is affected by identity, sociotropic concerns and is conditional on the country of residence.