In July 2020, EU member state governments agreed on a debt-financed 750 billion Euro recovery instrument to react on the pandemic crisis, a historical new. The policy found wide-spread support among Europeans. European solidarity is not dead, after all. I argue that the pandemic differs from previous crises in that it didn't allow for blame games.
From the welfare state literature, we know that people assess the deservingness of other societal groups - the unemployed, the old, the sick - and condition their willingness to show solidarity accordingly. Existing research remains however limited on the effect of cross-border deservingness attributions. In a context of European fiscal solidarity, people would have to estimate the deservingness of whole countries and its political leadership, rather than a societal group.
This paper examines whether and how individuals’ deservingness attributions of other EU countries (and their political leadership) affect their willingness to show European fiscal solidarity. Using survey data in ten EU countries from REScEU (Ferrera et al., 2019) and applying multilevel regression analysis, I show that deservingness attributions do explain attitudes on European fiscal solidarity.