Transnational Solidarity in the EU: Analysing Citizens' Boundaries of Solidarity in Laboratory Experiments

The European sovereign debt crisis and the political turf wars it entailed have underlined both the political relevance and the fragile state of transnational solidarity in the European Union.  In this paper, we study to what degree German and British citizens display some forms of solidarity with fellow Europeans by analyzing their redistributional behavior in laboratory experiments.  Using public goods provision games and dictator games, we examine under which conditions people are willing to redistribute EU-wide, and when they prefer to redistribute at the national or local level.  We test the following hypotheses: (1) People are more willing to redistribute to co-nationals than to other Europeans, and (2) British citizens are more reluctant to redistribute at the European level than German citizens.