Practising what you preach: how cosmopolitanism promotes willingness to redistribute across the European Union

ABSTRACT

The political fault lines surrounding the European sovereign debt crisis have underlined the political relevance and the fragile foundation of public support for international redistribution in the European Union. Against the backdrop of an emerging political integration-demarcation divide, this contribution examines how cosmopolitanism structures people’s willingness to redistribute internationally within the European Union. To this aim, we conducted laboratory experiments on redistributive behaviour towards other European citizens in the United Kingdom and Germany and analysed cross-national survey data on support for international redistribution covering the EU-28. Our findings suggest that cosmopolitanism increases generosity towards other Europeans and support for international redistribution even when controlling for self-interest, support for national redistribution, concern for others and political ideology.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmopolitanism
• experiments
• international redistribution
• sovereign debt crisis

Acknowledgements

Laboratory experiments were conducted at BLESS (Berlin), BLUE (Edinburgh), CESS (Oxford) and MELESSA (Munich). We thank Michele Belot, Ray Duch, Martin Kocher and Dorothea Kübler for granting us access to the laboratories. We thank Laura Cram, Juan Diez Medrano, Catherine de Vries, Dominik Düll, Monika Eigmüller, Juan Fernandez, Luara Ferracioli, Ann-Kristin Kölln, David Rueda, Waltraud Schelkle, Marco Steenbergen, Florian Stöckel, the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. Friederike Molitor and Marieke Lomans provided excellent research assistance. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Theresa Kuhn is associate professor in political science at the University of Amsterdam.

Hector Solaz is senior research officer at ESSEXLab and the Department of Government at the University of Essex.

Erika J. van Elsas is postdoctoral research fellow at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam.

Notes

1 A growing body of research challenges the role of self-interest for national redistribution as well.

2 However, as any collective identity, European identity requires a common other, which is often defined in ethnic or cultural terms (Diez 2004; Kuhn 2015).

3 Three participants were older than 35; removing them did not alter the results.

4 No information about the exact member state was given.

5 For the exact wording of the instructions, see appendix (D).

6 A principal axis factor analysis (promax oblique rotation) shows that these four items load on two distinct factors. The first factor relates city- and country-level concerns (Eigenvalue 2.56, respective factor loadings .79 and .85, remaining loadings <.4), while the second factor underlies concerns with people in Europe and humankind (Eigenvalue 2.27, respective factor loadings .61 and .74, remaining loadings <.4).

7 Many university students are financially supported by their parents and the state; it is therefore not sensible to measure their income. Alternatively, we assessed the effect of parental socio-economic background by adding the father’s educational level to the models. This had no significant effect in any of the models, and did not alter the results substantively. As it reduced the sample by 30 participants, we did not include it in the main models.

8 Estimations with a dummy for member states that joined in 2004–2013 and a dummy for net contributor status did not change the effect of our independent variables. Due to high collinearity they are not included in the final models. Missing values were treated by list-wise deletion.

9 Ordered logistic random intercept models are estimated using Stata’s gllamm package.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a British Academy grant [SG120276] and a VENI grant [451-13-029] of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research awarded to Theresa Kuhn.