Regional crises and European fiscal preferences: how regional Covid-19, economic downturn, and migration shape support for EU risk sharing

April 15, 2024·
Lukas Hetzer
Lukas Hetzer
,
Brian Burgoon
· 0 min read
Link
Abstract
Economic suffering prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic, coming on the heels of earlier 2008 global-financial and 2015 migration crises, revived debate on citizen support for European fiscal integration policies. Such support can be expected to reflect not only individual-level characteristics but also the extent of crisis exposure in subnational regional contexts where individuals live and work. Unfortunately, existing studies of public support have said little about such regional contexts. This study hence explores how regional-level experience with ‘polycrisis’ affects support for EU fiscal capacities, combining regional-level crisis measures with a 2020 survey experiment on European citizens’ preferences towards fiscal capacity instruments in 5 European countries (DE, ES, FR, IT, NL). This allows tests of whether individual support for various European fiscal capacities reflect regional differences in covid suffering, growth losses after the 2008 global financial crisis, and migration spikes from the 2015 migration crisis. We expect and find that citizens in regions more heavily impacted by the pandemic, financial crisis, and (albeit less so) migration crisis – measured separately and as a composite – tend to more readily support European fiscal integration capacity that is redistributive between countries, financed through progressive taxation, refrains from budgetary conditionality, and is lenient towards reform non-compliance.
Type
Publication
Journal of European Public Policy, 31(10), 3093-3127
publications
Lukas Hetzer
Authors
Lukas Hetzer (he/him)
Doctoral Researcher

I am a doctoral researcher in Political Science at the University of Cologne, where I work on European politics, political behavior, political communication, and public opinion.

My research focuses on how citizens, political actors, and institutions respond to crises and broader political challenges. A recurring emphasis of my work is on democratic politics under pressure, with particular interests in European integration, crisis governance, institutional change, political representation, and the communication of political conflict.

Methodologically, I work at the intersection of political science and computational social science. I use large-scale text data, quantitative computational methods, advanced survey designs and (quasi-)experiments to study political discourse, public opinion, and political behavior. I am also interested in building, linking, and analysing large-scale political datasets, particularly institutional text data from parliaments and EU institutions.

I hold an M.Sc. degree in Social Sciences Research from the University of Amsterdam and a B.Sc. degree in Social Sciences from Humboldt University Berlin. Before joining the University of Cologne, I worked at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences on election research and data-based knowledge transfer, and held research assistant positions at the University of Amsterdam, Ghent University, and Humboldt University Berlin. I also teach courses on quantitative methods, EU politics, and crisis politics.

Please feel free to explore my work and get in touch.

Authors
Brian Burgoon