Tit for tat? EU risk-sharing and experienced reciprocity

Abstract

As with previous crises, EU-wide risk-sharing has also been demanded during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, this crisis did not unfold in a political vacuum. Instead, public backing for EU-wide risk-sharing might have been informed by past crises experiences. Building on the idea of experienced reciprocal risk-sharing, we assume that the willingness to share risks is greater when a crisis-ridden country has also shown solidarity before, whereas readiness to cooperate may be mitigated by non-solidarity-oriented behaviour in the past. We test this assumption based on a survey experiment carried out in eleven EU countries in 2020. Our findings suggest that, when people are given information about whether another country has acted in solidarity in the past, this influences their willingness to support risk-sharing in the present. However, we also find evidence that respondents’ preferences outside the experimental setting do not always match their country's recent history of reciprocal risk-sharing.