Endogenous Troubles, Exogenous Sympathy: Policy Legacies and Public Support for EU Solidarity

Individual solidarity towards other EU member states during crises is crucial for facilitating a joint EU response without triggering a backlash from the public, which can act as a constraint on further integration (Hooghe & Marks, 2009). Patterns of solidarity differ across crises (Kriesi et al., 2024), yet we do not fully understand why. One set of explanations puts forward that crisis characteristics impact solidarity, with exogenous and symmetric crises being more conducive to solidarity compared to endogenous and asymmetric crises (Ferrara & Kriesi, 2022). Truchlewski et. al. (2025) show that COVID, beyond being perceived as symmetric and exogenous, also generated a high degree of empathy among EU citizens. In turn, this empathy translated into greater support for solidaristic policy. This study aims to untangle the role of crisis characteristics and individual empathy as determinants of EU solidarity. This experimental study employs a parallel encouragement design (Imai et al., 2013) to untangle the role of crisis characteristics and individual empathy. It presents respondents with hypothetical scenarios regarding a future financial crisis. The experiment varies whether the crisis has origins outside the EU or within the EU as well as whether it affects all countries or only some. Second, the experiment presents respondents with a memory task to stimulate empathy with other EU citizens (empathy encouragement), or preferentially with citizens of their own country (empathy discouragement). Finally, all respondents are asked whether they would support an EU aid package aimed at helping affected countries.