Deservingness heuristics and public support for European fiscal solidarity across EU member states

The core claim of the welfare deservingness literature is that public support for redistribution is to a large extent contingent on the perceived deservingness of its respective target groups. It is argued that whenever citizens face deservingness relevant cues in the public debate, a psychological ‘deservingness heuristic’ is triggered prompting individuals to think about welfare policy in terms of who deserves help. According to welfare deservingness theory, citizens normally use five criteria - the so-called ‘CARIN criteria’ - to justify what constitutes a fair distribution of social welfare funds among various target groups: control, attitude, reciprocity, identity, and need. This article builds on this framework to explain whether and how deservingness heuristics operate also at the EU level in shaping public support for cross-national fiscal solidarity. We argue that the different framing and the socio-spatial distribution of problem pressure characterising the crisis contribute to shape individuals’ perceptions on whether member states deserve to receive financial help from the other countries. To test this argument we employ data from an original survey conducted in 16 EU member states in the summer 2021 in the framework of the SOLID project. Our findings show that perceptions of deservingness play a different role in shaping the individual willingness to support intra-EU financial assistance across countries. Furthermore, deservingness criteria contribute also to moderate the association between general support for the EU and individual preferences for European solidarity. The relevance of deservingness heuristics with regards EU-wide risk-sharing mechanisms highlights the importance of policy design and elites’ political communication for understanding the politics of fiscal integration in the EU.