Transnational Solidarity Within the EU: Public Support for Risk-Sharing and Redistribution

Abstract

This paper aims to discover underlying, as yet theoretically and empirically unexplored, distinctions in citizens’ views of transnational solidarity within the European Union (EU). Building on literature regarding national welfare states, the paper presents an original concept of transnational solidarity consisting of two latent, not directly measurable, dimensions: first, citizens’ preferences for risk-sharing among EU states and, second, their preferences for intra-EU redistribution. The diverse types of transnational solidarity examined in previous research should be assignable to either one or the other dimension. Moreover, previous research is based on the idea that the concept of transnational solidarity is comparable across EU countries; however, this premise has not been empirically examined so far. To test both these assumptions, I analyze data collected in Austria, Germany, and Greece in 2019 or 2020. The study runs multi-group confirmatory factor analysis to test whether the presented concept of transnational solidarity (a) applies and (b) is comparable between these nations. The empirical analysis supports both these assumptions. The populations of the three countries share the same understanding of transnational solidarity even though the willingness to express cross-country risk-sharing and redistribution varies significantly between the states. The study contributes to current research in the fields of European integration, political sociology, and survey methodology.