SecEUrity Project: Willingness to Cooperate When Facing Own Costs

International cooperation has come under fire in Western democracies in the last years. However, there is only limited research on why respondents actually become dissatisfied with specific policies of international cooperation. We argue that people show higher levels of disapproval with international cooperation when being made aware of the potential costs of these initiatives (both on the societal and financial level). Respondents should be especially critical when they, as members of a specific social group, are directly affected by the societal costs. While the effect of costs on policy evaluations for international cooperation activities has been extensively studied before, we are the first to examine this for European international health policies within the COVID-19 context. Additionally, we take two specific costs into account: Societal costs, explicitly affecting citizens in metropolitan areas, and financial costs, burdening the national government or all participating countries. Societal costs in our scenario refer to reduced welfare state capacities in metropolitan areas when setting up an international health organization. Financial costs refer to the burden on public budgets associated with setting up this organization. We make two important contributions in our study: First, we assign societal costs to a clearly defined and identifiable social group that is directly affected by the costs of cooperation, which we are able to identify using both subjective self-assignment and objective measures. This allows us to test whether making the respondents aware of societal costs only occurring for people in metropolitan areas actually decreases the willingness to cooperate more strongly compared to those not living in metropolitan areas. Secondly, we differentiate between national financial costs and pooled European financial costs. This allows us to weigh the relative importance of these different financial costs and examine whether respondents react differently to these financial costs - although both finally come along with costs for their government. We test our hypotheses in a scenario focusing on building a powerful European health agency to fight future diseases and pandemics. The costs are experimentally varied on two dimensions: (A, Societal costs): 1. Mentioning of societal costs 2. no information; (B, Financial costs): 1. Mentioning of national financial costs 2. Mentioning of pooled (European) financial costs 3. no information. The experiment will be conducted in 20 EU member states and the UK, with target sample sizes of 750-1,000 per country.