European Member State Solidarity: The role of knowledge and awareness on support for European solidarity policies

Public support for European Union (EU) solidarity policies such as Next Generation EU (NGEU), SURE, and Cohesion Policy is crucial for their legitimacy and political sustainability. Yet citizens’ understanding of these instruments remains uneven, raising questions about whether—and how—policy knowledge shapes policy support. Building on research showing that policy-specific information conditions public responsiveness and that knowledge moderates rather than directly determines support for EU fiscal solidarity, this paper examines how citizens’ self-assessed knowledge of EU solidarity policies relates to their level of support. Using original survey data from thirteen EU member states, we distinguish between two dimensions of self-assessed understanding: policy awareness (knowing that a policy exists) and policy knowledge (knowing the policy content). We analyse how each relates to support for NGEU, SURE, and Cohesion Policy, and how these relationships interact with respondents’ integration priors and ideological orientations. This approach allows us to assess whether awareness merely reflects general EU engagement or whether deeper knowledge adds an independent cognitive layer to policy support formation. The study contributes to research on EU public opinion and fiscal solidarity in two ways. First, it extends the study of information effects to the supranational domain, where policy visibility is highly uneven. Second, it refines the link between knowledge and legitimacy, by inquiring the extent to which self-assessed policy knowledge adds to perceptions of policy legitimacy and support, beyond broader attitudes towards European integration.