European solidarity?: explaining EU citizens’ attitudes towards economic redistribution in the age of Brexit

What’s happening to European solidarity in the wake of Brexit? In this blog, Nicholas Charron and Monika Bauhr (University of Gothenburg) explains EU citizens’ attitudes towards cohesion policy. They find that less than one-half of EU citizens have even heard of the policy itself, while roughly one-third claim they have ‘benefitted from some EU project in their area’. They also observe that attitudes on support for EU economic integration have a lot to do with how people see home institutions and the degree of their European identity

¿Apoyan los ciudadanos la política de cohesión de la UE? Medida del apoyo europeo a la redistribución dentro de la UE

As the European Union enters into the next decade, its leaders seemingly strive towards more future integration rather than less, despite the recent setback of Brexit and the rise of anti-EU populist parties. In his state of the Union in 2018, Jean Claude Junker emphasized s ‘European solidarity’. One key policy ‘expression of solidary’ would be Cohesion Policy and the Structural Funds, which are “the only real, significant redistributive mechanism in the EU…” (Fratesi 2017). . Despite elite commentary, we know surprisingly little about what EU citizens think of the rationale behind the policy of Cohesion – e.g. economic redistribution within the EU. As part of the PERCEIVE Horizon2020 project, we launched a unique survey to investigate how citizens feel about economic integration within the Union, where 17,200 citizens were interviewed. In this paper, we show how we measure support for the policy, the results as well as a host of correlates. Our analysis shows the variation in citizens’ support for EU Cohesion policy between countries, how support varies between demographic groups, as well as the extent to which support is correlated with utilitarian and ideational factors as well as cue taking. Implications for future developments of this policy are discussed.A medida que la Unión Europea ingresa en la próxima década, sus líderes aparentemente luchan por más integración futura en lugar de menos, a pesar del reciente revés del Brexit y el surgimiento de los partidos populistas anti-UE. En su estado de la Unión en 2018, Jean Claude Junker hizo hincapié en la "solidaridad europea". Una política clave de "expresión de solidaridad" sería la Política de Cohesión y los Fondos Estructurales, que son "el único mecanismo redistributivo real y significativo en la UE..." (Fratesi 2017). A pesar de las opiniones de la élite, sorprendentemente sabemos poco sobre lo que piensan los ciudadanos de la UE sobre la lógica detrás de la Política de Cohesión, de la redistribución económica dentro de la UE. Como parte del proyecto PERCEIVE Horizon2020, llevamos a cabo una encuesta única para investigar cómo se sienten los ciudadanos acerca de la integración económica dentro de la Unión, entrevistando a 17.200 ciudadanos. En este documento, mostramos cómo medimos el apoyo a la política, los resultados y una serie de elementos relacionados. Nuestro análisis muestra la variación en el apoyo de los ciudadanos a la política de cohesión de la UE entre países, cómo varía el apoyo entre los grupos demográficos, así como la medida en la que el apoyo se correlaciona con factores utilitarios e ideológicos. Se discuten las implicaciones para futuros desarrollos de esta política

Perceptions of quality of government and support for Marine Le Pen in the 2022 French presidential election

Support for Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election differed substantially across the country. Using data from the European Quality of Government Index, Nicholas Charron and Monika Bauhr show that Le Pen won a greater share of support in areas where citizens are dissatisfied with the delivery of public services

Do Men and Women Perceive Corruption Differently? Gender Differences in Perception of Need and Greed Corruption

Do men and women perceive corruption differently? While evidence suggest that there is a strong link between gender and corruption, and that gender differences can at least partly be derived from men and women having different attitudes towards corruption, most studies to date focus on gender differences in perceptions of the scale or severity of the corruption in general, rather than its different forms. However, we argue that factors such as role socialization, social status and life experiences may make men and women perceive different kinds of corruption. Drawing on the distinction between ‘need’ and ‘greed’ corruption, we suggest that women are more likely than men to perceive that corruption is driven by need rather than greed. In particular, women may be more likely to be exposed to need corruption because of their greater care taking responsibilities both in the professional and private sphere, and, much in line with marginalization theory, have easier access to forms of corruption that are less dependent upon embeddedness in collusive networks. Using unique survey data, we show that women and men indeed differ in their perceptions of need vs. greed, and that women perceive more need corruption, while men perceive more greed corruption. This suggests that perceptions of different forms of corruption are indeed gendered and we discuss the implication of this for anti-corruption policy

Cambio y continuidad en la calidad de gobierno: tendencias en la calidad de gobierno subnacional en los estados miembros de la UE

Despite massive investments, studies suggest that anticorruption efforts often times fail and that countries and regions with historically deficient quality of government tend to be stuck in a vicious cycle of high levels of corruption and inadequate public service delivery. However, this study suggests that despite the stickiness of subnational quality of government, regional quality of government does shift over time. Using the 2021 European Quality of Government Index (EQI), and comparing the results to previous rounds of this survey, we show that there has indeed been noticeable shifts in the regional level of Quality of Government both within countries and across time. Overall, we find a slight increase in the perceived quality of government of European regions compared with 2017. However, some regions have evaded the positive trend, most notably in Poland and Hungary, whose response to the pandemic – probably not coincidentally – has involved important infringements of democratic rights and institutions. These changes in Quality of government call for a close mapping of the trends within countries and across regions and a focus on their determinants. To this end, the paper also serves as an introduction to the use of 2021 European Quality of Government (EQI) index, which is the most comprehensive survey to date to measure perceptions of subnational quality of government with a total of 129,000 respondents in 208 NUTS 1 and NUTS 2 regions and all EU 27-member state countries.A pesar de masivas inversiones económicas, los estudios sugieren que los esfuerzos anticorrupción a menudo fracasan y que los países y regiones con una calidad de gobierno históricamente deficiente tienden a quedar atrapados en un círculo vicioso de altos niveles de corrupción y una prestación inadecuada de los servicios públicos. Sin embargo, este artículo sugiere que, a pesar de cierta continuidad en la calidad de gobierno a nivel subnacional, hay cambios sustanciales a lo largo del tiempo. Usando el Índice Europeo de Calidad de Gobierno (EQI) de 2021, y comparando los resultados con oleadas anteriores de esta encuesta, mostramos que, de hecho, ha habido modificaciones notables en el nivel regional de Calidad de Gobierno tanto dentro de los países como a través del tiempo. En general, encontramos un ligero aumento en la percepción ciudadana de la calidad de gobierno de las regiones europeas en comparación con 2017. No obstante, algunas regiones han evadido esta tendencia positiva, sobre todo en Polonia y Hungría, países cuya respuesta a la pandemia, probablemente no por casualidad, ha implicado importantes violaciones de los derechos ciudadanos y libertades democráticas. Estos cambios en la calidad de gobierno exigen un análisis más detallado de las tendencias dentro de cada país, así como de sus causas. Con este objetivo, este artículo también sirve como introducción al uso de la edición de 2021 del Índice Europeo de Calidad de Gobierno (EQI), que es la encuesta más completa hasta la fecha para medir las percepciones ciudadanas de la calidad de gobierno subnacional con un total de 129,000 encuestados en 208 regiones NUTS 1 y NUTS 2, y de los 27 estados miembros de la UE

Corruption in the Carbon Market? International Organisations, Transparency and the Clash of Values

Are international organizations a positive force in improving good governance and reducing corruption? International organizations have traditionally been perceived as a positive force in international politics. This paper suggests that the effect of interaction with international organizations on quality of government (QoG) norms may depend on the type of system international organizations promote. In a study on the role of international organizations as constructers, supervisors and catalysers of the carbon market through the clean development mechanism (CDM), the paper shows that there are at least three major explanations why international organizations may promote bad rather than good government norms: leadership explanations, market logic explanation and informational explanations. The paper thereby shows the benefits of moving beyond descriptions of system level features, such as inbuilt transparency mechanisms, to also study the effect that systems have on participants involved. The analysis has implications for our understanding of the influence of international organizations in an area often ignored by good governance scholars: how and in what way international organizations influence quality of government through their important and growing role in the implementation of international environmental agreements

Turning a Blind Eye? The Impact of Corruption on Aid Fatigue

Why do donors continue to send foreign aid to corrupt countries, despite that corruption is increasingly seen as detrimental to economic and environmental development? This study unpacks the complex relationship between corruption and aid fatigue and suggests that while corruption reduces support for foreign aid, reactions to corruption in aid depend on both the circumstances under which corruption occurs and prospects for accountability. Building on scenario-based experiments, the results show that the end results of aid, the scale and the perceived social normality of corruption influences the effect of corruption on aid fatigue. They also show that corruption generates specific aid fatigue (directed towards individual projects or actors) rather than support for generalized (across-the-board cuts) in aid levels. This contributes towards explaining why previous studies have failed to find a link between corruption and aid fatigue and how citizens deal with the ”aid-corruption paradox”, i.e. that the need for foreign aid is often the greatest in corrupt environments

Building Quality of Government? International Organizations and Educational Performance in Africa

Although international organizations are often seen as an important transformative power on the international arena, we know less about how and when they promote better domestic institutions. Using data on education outcomes in 53 African countries from 1994-2008, we show that IOs use several empirically distinct channels through which they influence domestic outcomes: conditionality, rankings and international integration. We find that integration and high international rankings have a positive impact on education outputs, while IOs have a negative influence when they use conditional aid. Our findings have implications both for the diffusion of the quality of government agenda, and for advancing our knowledge of IO power

Why Pay Bribes? Collective Action and Anticorruption Efforts

This paper suggests that the effectiveness of current anticorruption policy suffers from a focus on the scale of the corruption problem instead of type of corruption that is to be fought. I make a distinction between need and greed corruption. Contrary to the most commonly used distinctions this distinction focuses on the basic motivation for paying a bribe, and whether the bribe is used to gain services that citizens are legally entitled to or not. Greed corruption is used to gain advantages that citizens are not legally entitled to, build on collusion rather than extortion and can thereby remain invisible and unobtrusive. In greed corruption societies the costs of corruption are divided between a large number of actors and the negative effects of corruption on economic and democratic performance are delayed and diffuse. I subsequently use this distinction to develop three propositions about the relationship between corruption and institutional trust, and the effects of anticorruption policy. Using both cross country data and a case study of a low corruption context, I suggests a) That greed corruption can coexist with high institutional trust, and that it thereby may not follow the expected, and often confirmed, negative relationship between corruption and institutional trust b) That greed corruption may not produce civic engagement against corruption and c) That increased transparency may not produce the expected benefits in low need corruption contexts, since it can disproportionally alter expectations about the entrenchment of corruption in a society. In other words, the paper suggest that the balance between need and greed corruption in a society determines the effectiveness of traditional policy measures derived from the logic of principal agent theory, such as societal accountability and transparency, and that the relevance of collective action theory to understand the effects of anticorruption efforts can be extended to contexts where the overall level of corruption is low