The boundaries of solidarity: multi-level governance and redistribution

Programme group: PETGOV

The increasing complexity and heterogeneity of contemporary societies represent a major challenge to European nation-states. Their boundaries of social rights, political participation and ethnic belonging used to be highly congruent. In the past few decades, however, globalization, European integration and mass immigration have eroded this congruence.

The Project

In the wake of these transformations, policy makers focusing on redistribution are facing a dilemma. In view of increased international interdependence, the call for supranational redistribution has become more vocal. At the same time, claims for more fiscal independence at the subnational level have become more frequent. In short, recent transformations of the state have unsettled our understanding of where taxes are paid, how they are spent, and who ultimately benefits from them.

This project seeks to understand people’s readiness to redistribute locally, nationally, or supranationally. It analyses how collective identities, generalized trust, national frames and decentralization influence preferences for redistribution at the local, national and European level.

Methods

To this aim, laboratory experiments using nested public goods provision games, dictator games, and benevolent dictator games will be conducted. The experiments will assess if and to what extent people prefer to redistribute previously made earnings at the local rather than the national or the European level, and how the amount of redistributed money changes if they are forced to redistribute at a certain level. Experiments will be conducted in Spain and the Netherlands. By doing so, this project builds on and complements earlier research carried out by the author in Germany and the United Kingdom. By adding two new cases, the project seeks to understand whether redistributional behaviour is dependent on contextual factors, such as decentralization and the sovereign debt crisis. To guarantee high external validity, experiments will be triangulated with opinion surveys among the British, Dutch, German, and Spanish population.

Funding: NWO Veni

Published by  AISSR

17 December 2014