Transnational solidarity and the European economic crisis

In broad and general terms, when we refer to solidarity within a political community, we talk about ‘the preparedness to share resources with others by personal contribution to those in struggle or in need and through taxation and redistribution organised by the state’ (Stjernø, Reference Stjernø2004: 2). For the EU, even though numerous treaties mention solidarity between member states, the term still lacks a precise definition in public as well as scientific debates (Kontochristou and Mascha, Reference Kontochristou and Mascha2014; Pantazatou, Reference Pantazatou2015).

In their research on solidarity in the EU, Gerhards and colleagues (Reference Gerhards, Lengfeld, Ignácz, Kley and Priem2019) define European solidarity as ‘a form of solidarity that goes beyond nation state containers and reflects a solidarity with other (European) countries and their citizens’ (Gerhards et al., Reference Gerhards, Lengfeld, Ignácz, Kley and Priem2019: 18). We follow this definition but use the term transnational solidarity when referring to measures that are meant to bring relief during the European Economic Crisis, as this term has frequently been used when focusing explicitly on the level of individuals (Ciornei and Recchi, Reference Ciornei and Recchi2017; Baute et al., Reference Baute, Abts and Meuleman2019).

Scholarly work on solidarity within the EU during the European Economic Crisis focuses on different actors.Footnote ² For representative democracies, we can distinguish between demand- and supply-side actors embedded in a specific institutional setting. On the demand-side, there are voters and interest groups, while the supply-side refers to parties and politicians. These actors find themselves in different relationships (Katz, Reference Katz2014). Citizens, on the one hand, influence the supply-side, but citizens’ preferences are also shaped and structured by demand-side actors (for instance Druckman et al., Reference Druckman, Peterson and Slothuus2013; Hobolt and de Vries, Reference Hobolt and de Vries2015). Politicians, on the other hand, set the party’s political course, but in return must also adapt their stances and behavior, i.e., they follow the prescribed party discipline (Bøggild, Reference Bøggild2020). At the same time, parties form governments and thereby shape policies, which are supposed to represent the interests of their voters, but without a doubt have an impact on the society at large.

A number of studies have been published mapping the macro level of European solidarity on the supply-side, that is, the reactions of governments, states, and political institutions (for instance, Frieden and Walter, Reference Frieden and Walter2019; Târlea et al., Reference Târlea, Bailer, Degner, Dellmuth, Leuffen, Lundgren, Tallberg and Wasserfallen2019; Wasserfallen et al., Reference Wasserfallen, Leuffen, Kudrna and Degner2019). However, the research strand that dominates the field examines public support for EU redistribution policies (among others Lengfeld et al., Reference Lengfeld, Schmidt and Häuberer2015; Lahusen and Grasso, Reference Lahusen, Grasso, Lahusen and Grasso2018; Gerhards et al., Reference Gerhards, Lengfeld, Ignácz, Kley and Priem2019). Most of these studies analyzed the preconditions for support of fellow EU states and named European identity (Ciornei and Recchi, Reference Ciornei and Recchi2017; Verhaegen, Reference Verhaegen2018), cosmopolitanism (Bechtel et al., Reference Bechtel, Hainmueller and Margalit2014; Ciornei and Recchi, Reference Ciornei and Recchi2017; Kuhn et al., Reference Kuhn, Solaz and van Elsas2018; Kleider and Stoeckel, Reference Kleider and Stoeckel2019), economic orientation (Kleider and Stoeckel, Reference Kleider and Stoeckel2019), and support for EU membership (Lahusen and Grasso, Reference Lahusen, Grasso, Lahusen and Grasso2018) as motivations.

In contrast, only few publications have investigated the positions of parties or politicians on solidarity measures, which severely limits our understanding of elite preferences. Furthermore, these studies more or less all focus on political parties and rely on parties’ media content (Bremer, Reference Bremer2018) or on parliamentary debates (Closa and Maatsch, Reference Closa and Maatsch2014; Maatsch, Reference Maatsch2014, Reference Maatsch2016). Despite providing important findings, these studies do not allow straight-forward conclusions about preferences of politicians or the determinants of these preferences. Votes in parliament, plenary contributions, and media appearances are strongly affected by party discipline, which creates problematic levels of distortion.

While a lack of studies on politicians’ preferences concerning transnational solidarity seems problematic per se, it becomes an even bigger issue thinking about political parties in modern democracies. Obviously, political parties rely on their internal organization, but they also rely heavily on their personnel when it comes to fulfilling their role in the democratic process (Gunther and Diamond, Reference Gunther and Diamond2003). Politicians are crucial in communicating with citizens, either directly or via the media (Kitschelt, Reference Kitschelt2000; Römmele, Reference Römmele2003; Matsubayashi, Reference Matsubayashi2013). Depending on the electoral system, individual politicians – or, more precisely, their background and policy positions – are the main focus of citizens’ voting decisions (e.g., Huckfeldt and Sprague, Reference Huckfeldt and Sprague1992). Even in less candidate-centered electoral systems, politicians are the face of a party and constitute the group of individuals from which representatives are selected (Mitchell, Reference Mitchell2000).

Proceeding from there, we argue that taking a closer look at individual politicians’ preferences is relevant for (at least) two reasons: The first reason relates to the issue of representation. Whether or not the general public agrees with political decisions concerning transnational solidarity or whether there is at least a correspondence in preference formation between voters and representatives of their party is crucial for the quality of a representative democracy. If citizens do not agree with the behavior of political elites, this can result in voter shifts or even decreasing levels of democratic satisfaction. While governments and parties are important actors in representative democracies, they are neither unitary actors nor the only relevant actors on the supply side of politics. Understanding preference formation regarding transnational solidarity of individual politicians and comparing the degree of congruence of these processes to respective patterns in the citizenry can greatly increase our understanding of representational quality in times of crisis.

The second reason refers to the relative importance of attitudes, on the one hand, and contextual and environmental factors, on the other hand, for political elites’ policy preferences. We build on the work of Bartels (Reference Bartels, MacKuen and Rabinowitz2003), Zaller (Reference Zaller1992), and others to distinguish between general attitudes and specific preferences for transnational solidarity that are influenced by these general attitudes. Importantly, research has shown that this relationship depends on various contextual and environmental factors (e.g., Sniderman et al., Reference Sniderman, Brody and Tetlock1991; Zaller, Reference Zaller1992; Zuckerman et al., Reference Zuckerman, Kotler-Berkowitz and Swaine1998; Bartels, Reference Bartels, MacKuen and Rabinowitz2003) – also concerning transnational solidarity of citizens (see Lengfeld et al., Reference Lengfeld, Schmidt and Häuberer2015; Lahusen and Grasso, Reference Lahusen, Grasso, Lahusen and Grasso2018; Vasilopoulou and Talving, Reference Vasilopoulou and Talving2020). Looking at individual politicians allows USA very nuanced analysis of how this relationship is moderated and also under which contextual circumstances attitudes might lose their effect on preferences. Considering the extreme but also quite heterogeneous situation within the EU during the European Economic Crisis, this is not just of interest to better understand preference formation during this period but can also increase our more general understanding of such moderations.

Consequently, while focusing on individual members of the political elite, we address two important research questions. Looking at the issue of representation, we first ask whether the political elite’s preferences for transnational solidarity are driven by similar considerations than those of the citizenry elaborated in previous research. The second question investigates how the relationship between attitudes and preferences is moderated by contextual factors and what this means for the comparative importance of these sets of factors.

Understanding politicians’ preferences for transnational solidarity

Existing studies show that transnational solidarity seems to be higher for politicians compared to voters (Ferrera and Pellegata, Reference Ferrera and Pellegata2019; Basile et al., Reference Basile, Borri, Verzichelli, Cotta and Isernia2020; Basile and Olmastroni, Reference Basile and Olmastroni2020). This points to a problematic gap in terms of political representation – at least, concerning the level of support.

With very few exceptions, however, there is a lack of a comprehensive attempt to identify motives for transnational solidarity within the political elite. Regarding redistribution policies during a period of a high migration numbers, similar relations between sociopolitical attitudes and preferences for transnational solidarity are present for politicians and voters alike (Basile and Olmastroni, Reference Basile and Olmastroni2020). While Basile et al. (Reference Basile, Borri, Verzichelli, Cotta and Isernia2020) work is the only study so far examining political elites’ transnational solidarity and its determinants in times of an economic crisis, e.g., country affiliation, EU attitudes, as well as positioning on globalization and the political left–right spectrum, it also suffers from some weaknesses. First, the numbers of politicians interviewed both per country and per party are rather low, which could explain the lack of significant regression results with regard to context variables. Second, although this study investigates the effect of country affiliation on transnational burden-sharing, it ignores the moderating role of contexts for politicians’ attitudes on their transnational solidarity preferences.

Our work addresses the shortcomings of previous studies and extends them in several respects. Our empirical analyses are based on a sufficiently large database justifying the use of multivariate analysis methods and drawing initial conclusions about hitherto unexplored variances on the political supply side. Moreover, we not only consider the direct effect of country dummies but also examine the moderating role of contextual environments.

Attitudinal base of transnational solidarity

In this paper, we follow Bartels’ (Reference Bartels, MacKuen and Rabinowitz2003) distinction of attitudes – relatively stable psychological leanings – and preferences – particular and situational expressions (see also Kuklinski and Peyton, Reference Kuklinski, Peyton, Klingemann and Dalton2009: 8). This study pursues the idea that attitudes that are more general influence specific preferences (Sniderman et al., Reference Sniderman, Brody and Tetlock1991; Stevens et al., Reference Stevens, Bishin and Barr2006). This is related to research on belief systems (e.g., Kuklinski and Peyton, Reference Kuklinski, Peyton, Klingemann and Dalton2009), assuming a certain interrelatedness of attitudes and preferences and to the idea of heuristics (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky, Reference Kahneman and Tversky1982), which are used to form preferences while ignoring complexity.

Going back to the seminal work of Converse (Reference Converse2006 [1964]), there is some debate on the comparability of belief systems and processes of attitude formation when looking at citizens and (political) elites. Citizens are assumed to be less consistent than, for example, political elites, who are assumed to think more frequently about politics and are supposed to do so in a more logical way. However, a stronger dependence of preferences on attitudes does not mean that the process differs between the two groups. We would simply expect an even stronger relationship for elites than regular citizens, since elite beliefs are even more strongly structured than mass beliefs (Peffley and Rohrschneider, Reference Peffley, Rohrschneider, Dalton and Klingemann2007). This assumption is not only important for this study or research on representation and representative democracy in general but also for several other fields of research. For example, research on political competition is not only very much based on the idea that there is a common understanding of politics and political issues between parties and voters (e.g., Adams, Reference Adams2012) but has also shown that this is the case empirically (e.g., Lichteblau et al., Reference Lichteblau, Giebler and Wagner2020).

Comparable to support for redistributive policies within a nation state, such as the expansion of the welfare state (see for instance, Amable et al., Reference Amable, Gatti and Schumacher2006; Lefkofridi and Michel, Reference Lefkofridi, Michel, Banting and Kymlicka2017; Kiess and Trenz, Reference Kiess and Trenz2019), preferences for transnational solidarity during the European Economic Crisis should also be based on the politician’s placement on the socioeconomic left–right dimension. The consideration of economic left–right orientations is crucial for studying public conflicts over fiscal transfers (Kleider and Stoeckel, Reference Kleider and Stoeckel2019). In fact, research on public support for transnational solidarity has shown that economically more right-wing citizens tend to be opposed to financial redistribution between countries (Baute et al., Reference Baute, Abts and Meuleman2019), whereas “people on the left were more in favour of increasing the amount of assistance for crisis-affected countries” (Gerhards et al., Reference Gerhards, Lengfeld, Ignácz, Kley and Priem2019: 85). These findings are also supported on behalf of political elites (Basile et al., Reference Basile, Borri, Verzichelli, Cotta and Isernia2020). Therefore, our first research hypothesis reads as follows:

By definition, transnational solidarity goes beyond the national context. Hence, attitudes toward international cooperation should be of relevance. In the European context, attitudes toward the EU fit perfectly with this assumption. When European integration policies are generally rejected, willingness to financially invest in the stability of the community or to assist fellow states in crisis should also be low. In the citizenry, Eurosceptic sentiments correlate with feelings of low transnational solidarity (Baute et al., Reference Baute, Abts and Meuleman2019; Reinl, Reference Reinl, Baldassari, Castelli, Truffelli and Vezzani2020), and Eurosceptic parties tend to vote against anticrisis measures (Maatsch, Reference Maatsch2016). In contrast, those citizens who identify with the EU are more likely to favor financial emergency relief (Gerhards et al., Reference Gerhards, Lengfeld, Ignácz, Kley and Priem2019: 88). We therefore also expect to find more support among politicians holding positive attitudes toward the EU and European integration. This assumption was likewise backed by Basile et al.’s (Reference Basile, Borri, Verzichelli, Cotta and Isernia2020) elite study.

Economic difficulties and responsibility ascription: additions to and constraints of the attitude-preference link

Political preferences vary according to people’s social and political environment (Zuckerman et al., Reference Zuckerman, Kotler-Berkowitz and Swaine1998; Bartels, Reference Bartels, MacKuen and Rabinowitz2003). Zaller (Reference Zaller1992) argues that expressed attitudes strongly depend on the (informational) environment. These insights are in line with Sniderman et al. (Reference Sniderman, Brody and Tetlock1991) revealing that preferences depend on political predispositions and are context-dependent. As Figure 1 illustrates, in addition to the already discussed effect of general attitudes, we argue that context and environment can both have a direct role for preferences but also a moderating effect (dashed arrow) on the relationship of attitudes on preferences.

Figure 1.

Theoretical argument.

Obviously, the number of contextual factors influencing a politician’s preference formation is very high. However, a meaningful selection has to be made. We have decided to follow the same strategy as applied when identifying general attitudes that influence solidarity preferences: again, we draw on research on public opinion. Not only does this allow us to test the general argument of conditionality but also to evaluate whether there are similar mechanisms at work when looking at the political supply- and demand-side.

Kuklinski and Peyton (Reference Kuklinski, Peyton, Klingemann and Dalton2009: 10) claim that people start updating their beliefs if conditions start to change. Changes in the national economic performance constitute such a situation. Individuals living in countries with a good and stable economic performance show more support for intra-EU financial transfers (Kleider and Stoeckel, Reference Kleider and Stoeckel2019; Vasilopoulou and Talving, Reference Vasilopoulou and Talving2020). In contrast, when national financial resources are limited, voters prefer to spend the money on national affairs rather than distributing it within the EU (Lengfeld et al., Reference Lengfeld, Schmidt and Häuberer2015). In simple terms, this kind of transnational solidarity has its price and the willingness to pay this price increases if societies are better off.

However, if we follow the rational choice paradigm, we would instead assume that politicians favor financial redistribution policies if their country benefits as a recipient state. This has already been shown in studies of regional redistribution programs within countries (Heinemann et al. Reference Heinemann, Janeba, Moessinger, Schröder and Streif2014; Balcells et al., Reference Balcells, Fernández-Albertos and Kuo2015) as well as with regard to public support for solidarity actions between EU states. Debtor states are much more in favor of intra-EU financial redistribution policies than creditor states, which usually have to pay (more) for such measures (Genschel and Hemerijck, Reference Genschel and Hemerijck2018; Gerhards et al., Reference Gerhards, Lengfeld, Ignácz, Kley and Priem2019: 89–91). Moreover, the stronger the national economy the less citizens tend to support European economic governance (Kuhn and Stoeckel, Reference Kuhn and Stoeckel2014). All in all, it seems more plausible to expect more support for transnational solidarity if a country’s economic performance is poor or deteriorating.

Furthermore, despite their more market-oriented political orientation, even right-wing parties from debtor states favored European redistribution policies (Maatsch, Reference Maatsch2014). We therefore assume conditional effects for the national economic performance on the impact of attitudes on transnational solidarity. Depending on the country a politician lives in, s/he may be in favor of financial redistribution policies despite a socioeconomically right-wing or anti-EU position if the economic misery index is high. National economic self-interest outweighs the impact of attitudes and, hence, attitudinal differences should matter less.

Previous research has also shown that whether people are responsible for their current plight constitutes an important criterion for deserving solidarity (van Oorschot, Reference Van Oorschot2000). Whether a politician believes that a country deserves solidarity can be described in our framework as the result of information processing. The outcome of this process influences how general attitudes are transformed into policy preferences, as it constitutes the informational environment (Zaller, Reference Zaller1992; Bartels, Reference Bartels, MacKuen and Rabinowitz2003).

Many citizens living in better off creditor states, such as Germany, have negative preconceptions about their ‘lazy’ fellow EU citizens in Southern Europe (Stjernø, Reference Stjernø2011: 172; Kontochristou, Reference Kontochristou2014). Gerhards and colleagues (Reference Gerhards, Lengfeld, Ignácz, Kley and Priem2019: 246) presume that citizens become more skeptical toward intercountry redistribution policies when they get the impression that state administrations in the receiving countries are misusing monetary bailout. Indeed, according to a comparative survey in the context of the European Economic Crisis, one-third of respondents states that no financial aid should be given to countries that have handled money poorly in the past (Lahusen and Grasso, Reference Lahusen, Grasso, Lahusen and Grasso2018: 260–262). In line with this, we expect that politicians tend to be less supportive of transnational solidarity if they believe that the recipient states themselves are responsible for the crisis.

Again, we also expect the impact of attitudes on the willingness to support transnational solidarity to be conditioned by the attribution of responsibility. For example, general attitudes opposed to redistribution or common European strategies should show an especially strong effect of rejecting transnational solidarity if politicians believe that the receiving states are in a self-imposed situation. Identical to H3b, we therefore expect differences in attitudes to matter more or less depending on contextual and environmental factors.

Data and operationalization

While there are several data sources and ways to measure policy positions of political parties – ranging from hand- or machine-coded documents to expert judgments – information on individual politicians is rather scarce. This becomes even more problematic when, as in this paper, the researchers are not merely interested in top politicians such as party leaders or presidential candidates, but in a comprehensive coverage of party elites.

We rely on candidate surveys to identify politicians’ policy positions. Specifically, we use data from the Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS, 2020). The political elite data collected on the national level for the module including questions about transnational solidarity is then integrated into a comparative data set covering elections, which took place between 2013 and 2018. Furthermore, the 2014 European Election Candidate Survey (GLES, 2017) provides information for some additional countries and elections, since it uses a more or less identical core questionnaire.Footnote ³ Politicians running for office in the national or European Parliament constitute mid- to high-level political elites who play a major role in shaping the (national) political arena. Hence, understanding processes of preference formation of these actors better and investigating potential differences due to ideology, party, or context can inform future research on party developments or the potential consequences of the personalization of politics.

Our database covers information on politicians from nine EU member states: Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, and the UK. The countries included in this study thus represent a heterogeneous group of EU member states, which differ from each other in many respects, such as national economic performance, the country’s status during the European Economic Crisis (with Greece, Portugal, and Romania as receiving countries), or the duration of EU membership. Moreover, we cover different welfare regimes, different levels of democratic quality, as well as countries with and without a socialist past. In other words, while we are unable to conduct a large-N comparison on the country level, our findings allow for at least some generalization.

As our dependent variable measures transnational solidarity in the context of the European Economic Crisis, we use two survey items for which the respondents’ agreement was measured on a five-point Likert scale: (1) ‘The EU should continue to support all current members of the Eurozone facing major financial crises’ and (2) ‘The EU and/or IMF should provide funds for more investment to stimulate economic growth’. In combination, from a conceptual and a methodological standpoint, these items provide a valid measure of transnational solidarity. We calculate the mean value for each respondent; high values indicate more support for transnational solidarity. Finally, we grand-mean center the values applying post-stratification weights which means that positive values refer to above-average support of transnational solidarity.Footnote ⁴

As we argued above, specific preferences toward transnational solidarity should depend on general attitudes on two core dimensions of political conflict – socioeconomic issues and EU issues. The surveys provide several items related to these two dimensions. There are three items to measure the socioeconomic dimension: the intervention of the government in the economy, the provision of social security by the government, and the government’s role in reducing income differences (all measured on five-point scales). There are two suitable indicators to measure attitudes on the EU dimension: evaluation of EU membership (three-point scale) and preferences for more or for less European integration (eleven-point scale).Footnote ⁵ The general attitudes are calculated on the basis of confirmatory factor analyses concerning socioeconomic issues. As there are only two indicators measuring EU issues, we again simply calculate the mean value of the respective items; high values indicate a socioeconomic left-wing or pro-EU position.

We use two items to operationalize ascribed national responsibility for the European Economic Crisis. The first asks about the responsibility of national politicians and governments, while the second refers to all of the people in the country. Combining these items, we cover cultural issues and failures of political elites that were both present in debates during the European Economic Crisis. Again, we calculate the mean values of both items, which are measured on five-point Likert scales; high values represent higher ascribed national responsibility.Footnote ⁶

As a second constraining factor, we add the economic misery index as a macro-level indicator. Originally introduced as the Economic Discomfort Index in the 1960s and later rebranded as the Economic Misery Index by the Reagan administration (Lovell and Tien, Reference Lovell and Tien2000), the index is calculated as the sum of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, which we took from Eurostat (2019a, b). Such an index is often used as a proxy for the overall economic situation influencing political attitudes and behavior, e.g., in the context of economic voting (Lewis-Beck, Reference Lewis-Beck2006). To incorporate the lingering effect of economic situations, we use the average value for the period of two to four years before the politicians were surveyed.

We also incorporate several control variables at the micro, meso, and macro level. At the individual level, we differentiate between politicians on the basis of their role and experience by introducing a binary indicator of being a Member of Parliament (MP). We also control for a person’s gender, age (measured in years), and educational attainment (1 = low, 2 = medium, and 3 = high).

Moreover, other factors should also impact the person’s preference regarding transnational solidarity. First and foremost, this preference should be influenced by the party’s position on the two dimensions of political conflict. We measure party positions using data from the MARPOR group (Volkens et al., Reference Volkens, Krause, Lehmann, Matthieß, Merz, Regel and Weßels2018). Building on work by Volkens and Merz (Reference Volkens, Merz, Merkel and Kneip2018), we selected coding categories that best fit the two dimensions of political conflict. Following common practice to transform these frequency scores into positional values for party positions regarding socioeconomic and EU issues, we rely on logit-transformed scales (Lowe et al., Reference Lowe, Benoit, Mikhaylov and Laver2011). High values indicate a socioeconomic left-wing or pro-EU position. In addition, whether or not a respondent’s party is in government constitutes another relevant factor to control for. Data to construct this binary indicator (1 = party is in government; 0 = party is not in government) are taken from the GovElec database (WZB, 2019). Government participation is determined at the time when the elite surveys were in the field, which is not always directly after an election has taken place.

On the country level, we add a measure of public opinion regarding transnational solidarity in a country. This helps us to verify whether elite preferences simply cater to voter positions. Here, we use data provided by the 2014 European Election Study (Schmitt et al., Reference Schmitt, Hobolt, Popa and Teperoglou2016) and rely on average positions of citizens as it is commonly done in research on party positions or positional shifts (e.g., Adams, Reference Adams2012; Hobolt and de Vries, Reference Hobolt and de Vries2015).Footnote ⁷ We also control for whether the respondent stood as a candidate at a national or European election. This should allow us to pick up systematic bias due to the election type.Footnote ⁸

All in all, this allows us to conduct our analysis for candidates of 12 elections in nine different countries. These elections cover more than 50 different political parties and provide data for 3990 politicians.Footnote ⁹ While the large data requirements result in substantive limitations – e.g., the MARPOR data set only includes parties with parliamentary representation – this nevertheless constitutes the most comprehensive approach to measuring and explaining elites’ positions on transnational solidarity as of now.Footnote ¹⁰

We use linear multilevel models to acknowledge the hierarchical and complex data structure with respondents nested in parties nested in elections. The resulting three-level model does not only correct for correlated error terms by cluster, but also provides meaningful standard errors for explanatory variables on the two higher levels. Furthermore, we run the estimation model on weighted data. More precisely, parties are weighted based on their vote share in the last national election, while we also add weights to ensure equal importance for all elections covered. Both decisions help to control for unequal numbers of candidates as well as response rates, which poses a problem in elite surveys, while also considering the political reality in each context. Finally, we have standardized all continuous independent variables following Gelman’s (Reference Gelman2008) approach to standardization, which allows for direct comparison between all variables including categorical indicators.