Closer in hard times? The drivers of European solidarity in ‘normal' and ‘crisis' times

This article examines the trends and differences in predictors of public support for European Union (EU) fiscal solidarity using two individual surveys conducted in 2019 and 2020, before and during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, in six Western European countries. We focus on individual self-interest and European/national identification as the two major determinants of public preference formation. Empirical analyses show that, while the average level of public support for European fiscal solidarity did not change from 2019 to 2020, the negative associations between exclusive national identification and economic vulnerability, on the one hand, and EU fiscal solidarity on the other were weakened. Among both, the identitarian source retained substantive (although reduced) relevance in 2020, while utility did not. Country-level analyses reveal a more complex picture, but the overall pattern holds across the member states included in our sample. We argue that the reduced explanatory power of these typical heuristics that individuals use to shape their attitudes towards European solidarity is connected to the nature of the pandemic as an exogenous ‘common crisis', affecting all member states in a supposedly symmetric manner, at least in the first phase, and inducing interdependencies among them. © 2023, The Author(s).

Evaluating the Government's Performance at the Time of COVID-19

This article investigates Italian public opinion preferences towards the government during the COVID-19 pandemic. Italy has been the first country in Europe severely hit by this crisis, and its executive has been the first one in the West to gradually introduce lockdown measures to hinder the spread of the virus. Against this backdrop we assess Italian citizens' opinions on government performance in two policy areas: the management of the health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak. Results of analysis, based on survey data collected when the country was in full lockdown, suggest that during the pandemic the evaluation of government's performance to manage the health crisis was affected by the rally-round-the-flag effect. Instead, the evaluation of economic measures remained based on retrospective considerations. © 2021 Societa Editrice il Mulino. All rights reserved.