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Based on a conjoint survey experiment we explore the support among European citizens for a European Union (EU) budgetary assistance instrument to combat adverse temporary or permanent economic shocks hitting Member States. Suitably designed, there is quite substantial support for such an EU instrument generally and across the sample countries. Support is broader when budgetary support is conditional on debt reduction in normal times and spent in specific policy areas, in particular healthcare and education. Support also increases when there is a role for the European Commission in terms of monitoring and providing guidance. However, there is little support for policy packages that terminate a program and impose a fine in the case of non-compliance. Further, there is broad acceptance of long-run redistribution towards poorer countries. Financing the assistance through a progressive tax increase is more popular than through a flat tax increase. In general, there is substantial scope for constructing assistance packages that command a majority support in all sample countries. The survey was fielded in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, in which the prospect of a severe economic shock became realistic. However, the results of our survey are based on respondent views in a (partially) pre-political environment: respondents had the opportunity to reason and form their own opinion about the assistance package before concrete policy proposals were debated by political parties that seek the edges of polarization.

Infectieziekten zoals corona kennen geen landsgrenzen, maar toch is de bestrijding ervan nog steeds primair een nationale aangelegenheid. Met een gezamenlijke inkoop, opslag en toewijzing van medische middelen op EU niveau kunnen infectieziekten sneller bestreden worden. Maar zou daar onder burgers draagvlak voor zijn?

In this paper we confront the role the EU traditionally plays in the domain of health with the urgent need for collective action triggered by the corona virus pandemic. In the face of such a crisis, we argue that the joint procurement, stockpiling and allocation of medical countermeasures is a key component of true European solidarity, besides maintaining the integrity of the Single Market. We present the first results of a survey experiment taken before the current crisis on citizens’ attitudes towards centralizing at the EU level of policies to combat infectious diseases, which indicates considerable support. We conclude that a more robust policy framework with substantial centralization of procurement, stockpiling and allocation is warranted.

In the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis, proposals to share the risk of unemployment shocks have been high on the political agenda. Welfare states have built-in automatic stabilisers to cushion economic shocks, notably unemployment insurance. The argument with regard to the Eurozone is that a monetary union needs mechanisms to buttress or complement the automatic stabilizers of its member states; support for national unemployment insurance might achieve this. However, are European citizens ready to share the risk of unemployment crises hitting their countries? This report sheds light on that crucial, yet unresolved question by conducting a conjoint survey experiment on public support for European unemployment risk sharing (EURS) among a representative sample of 19641 respondents in 13 European member states in October and November 2018. The conjoint experiment studies citizen preferences for policy proposals, implementing EURS, that vary on six dimensions: (1) generosity, (2) education and training conditions, (3) between-country redistribution, (4) national versus European administration, (5) impact on taxes, and (6) conditions with regard to individual job search effort. Our results show that policy design matters for public support. They also highlight variation across countries and socio-economic and ideological differences among citizens. Most importantly, fundamental opposition to EURS is confined to a small segment of the European population. In all countries in the sample, there are potential majorities for specific policy packages that organize EURS. A summary of the report (15 pp.) is available in German, French, Italian and Dutch. Click EURS Report and you will find, under the heading Materials, these summaries.

This article explores whether private regulatory activity to promote labour and social standards might hollow out traditional public regulations to provide welfare and labour protection at home and abroad. Such exploration has hitherto been frustrated by empirical limitations of measures of private regulatory activity and its implications for public regulation. The present article extends those limits by focusing on how new measures of labour‐related private regulation affect attitudes in 27 European polities towards welfare redistribution and for foreign assistance. Our analysis suggests that private‐regulatory CSR promoting labour and social standards may directly and indirectly diminish public support for domestic welfare redistribution, but appears to have little effect on support for foreign aid. We see, hence, possible crowding‐out only with respect to domestic, not international, assistance.

In our contribution to this volume, we argue that Dutch science-funding practices should be recalibrated because the status quo fails to meet its own stated objectives and is causing non-trivial harm along the way. We challenge, in particular, the existing bias toward identifying and awarding scholarly niches and national champions with large grants to ever tinier shares of the submitted proposals. We argue that this is wasteful spending and, when scrutinized, based on unrealistic assumptions about the nature of scientific research and the composition of the scientific community. The bias also skews the incentives for young researchers: by creating a...

This chapter explores the empirical challenges of understanding the socioeconomic implications of social investment welfare reform. Such understanding is crucial to gauging the pay-offs and pitfalls of social investment, but is also extremely difficult, given the complex character of social investment and its multiple and interacting consequences for work and well-being. Such complexity, the chapter contends, yields an unusually strong tension between relevance and rigour that dooms any dialogue among social scientists and practitioners with clashing methodological commitments. The present study argues in favour of a practical pluralism to facilitate such dialogue. This pluralism entails combining and comparing empirical work across the full spectrum of relevance and rigour. The chapter illustrates the problems and pluralist solutions with a combination of macro-country-year and macro-individual-year analysis of how active labour-market policies (ALMP) affect the poverty of vulnerable citizens.

Immigration has risen substantially in many European economies, with far-reaching if still uncertain implications for labour markets and industrial relations. This article investigates such implications, focusing on employment flexibility, involving both ‘external flexibility’ (fixed-term or temporary agency and/or involuntary part-time work) and ‘internal flexibility’ (overtime and/or balancing-time accounts). The article identifies reasons why immigration should generally increase the incidence of such flexibility, and why external flexibility should rise more than internal flexibility. The article supports these claims using a dataset of establishments in 16 European countries.

In recent years, developments in intergovernmental organizations and transnational private governance organizations have created new opportunities and constraints for the promotion of global labour-standards governance by civil society organizations (CSOs). This article describes how European CSOs (including trade union organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)) respond to these developments. It argues that European civil society is witnessing a threefold shift in priorities of labour-standards advocacy: from pushing regulatory approaches to organizational capacity building; from corporate responsibility strategies focused on compliance to strategies focused on transparency; and from fair labour standards within the sustainable development agenda to a host of other issues. The overall result is that labour-standards advocacy in general and private labour governance in particular are receiving less attention from European CSOs.