Democracies in Europe face a multitude of societal challenges that are thought to affect political solidarities negatively.
• Population ageing changes the intergenerational balance of age groups and puts the intergenerational contract enshrined in the public pension system in danger (Goerres & Vanhuysse, 2012).
• Growing income inequality sets the worlds of the rich and the poor further apart. Everyday segregation between income groups, especially residential segregation, makes it increasingly difficult for rich people to see themselves in solidarity with the poor with whom they rarely interact in everyday life (Sands, 2017).
• Mass immigration diversifies the ethnic, linguistic and religious make-up of societies, and reduces the likelihood that someone benefitting from a policy is like oneself in terms of these socially constructed lines of identity (Banting & Kymlicka, 2017a).
• The pandemic Covid-19 created strains on societies, public budgets and states.
Modern European democracies also face a number of political challenges, which are partially the consequences of societal developments. The financial crisis of 2007/2008 with its EU bail-out policies and the Brexit referendum in 2016 raise the question of transnational political solidarities across EU member states. The rise of right-wing populism since the mid-1980s, as evidenced by several political parties across Europe with a strong welfare-chauvinist stance, makes the issue of who is in and out of a community within a nation-state very salient in political discourse.
This project starts from the assumption that political solidarities are necessary for functioning liberal democracies. POLITSOLID is about experimentally testing the causes of political solidarities across European democracies. Political solidarities are conceptualised as a multidimensional phenomenon at the individual level. They consist of general political solidarity and group-specific political solidarities. A citizen of a nation-state, or of another community of solidarity, has a certain level of willingness to support redistribution within that nation-state regardless of the recipients. This is general political solidarity. Additionally, citizens support redistribution only for members of a certain social group. This is called group-specific political solidarity, and its level is partially determined by general political solidarity.
The main communities of solidarity that define the political basis for public redistribution in focus will be: (1) citizens and residents of a nation-state, (2) citizens and residents of the EU, and (3) residents of a locality. Redistribution is defined as any public allocation of resources, be it in terms of monies, services or advantageous regulations, to other individuals in one’s community of solidarity. Three social groups will be looked at with regard to of group-specific political solidarities: age, income and ethnicity/descent. They stem from the macro-level observations of societal challenges (population ageing, rising income inequality and immigration) mentioned above.
The project will produce new methodologies of measuring political solidarities in surveys and how to gauge the causal effects of macro-, meso- and micro-level factors on political solidarities with a new virtual world platform. Large-N panel surveys in several countries and field experiments with local actors allow to test the wider implications of the findings and the poential of real-world improvement for better citizen-state relationships.
