The boundaries of solidarity: multi-level governance and redistribution
Programme Group Political Economy and Transnational Governance (PETGOV)
This NWO VENI funded project seeks to understand people's readiness to redistribute locally, nationally, or supranationally.
Funded by: NWO VENI
Period: 05/02/2014 until 04/02/2017
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.
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.
Therefore, this project analyses how collective identities, generalized trust, national frames and decentralization influence preferences for redistribution at the local, national and European level.
Research Methods
Laboratory experiments will be conducted using nested public goods provision games, dictator games, and benevolent dictator games. 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