ABSTRACT
With the European economic crisis, the economic convergence process between EU member states has slowed down and disparities have become larger than in the past. One possible solution to halt this economic divergence is to establish mechanisms for redistributing wealth between member states in the long term, such as EU convergence policies. In this chapter, we investigate citizens’ attitudes towards reducing wealth differences between rich and poor EU countries. We find a high level of approval for this notion, and a majority of citizens in each of the 13 surveyed countries support the idea, even though country differences are present. The overall level of approval is only slightly below the support levels for reducing disparities between regions within respondents’ own nation states but higher than approval for a comparable global measure. Multivariate analyses reveal only weak structural and moderate cultural cleavages. Those with left-wing political value orientations as well as those expressing a global identity are more in favour of territorial solidarity. Although those rejecting territorial solidarity are more likely to vote for right-wing Eurosceptic parties, this association is rather weak and, therefore, we can only find a slight indication for possible political cleavages.
