Fiscal solidarity and public trust: citizens’ responses to the Next Generation EU

This thesis examines how supranational fiscal solidarity shapes citizens’ trust in European Union institutions, focusing on the NextGenerationEU (NGEU) recovery instrument. The creation of NGEU marked an unprecedented expansion of the EU’s fiscal capacity and represented one of the most ambitious collective responses to a crisis in the Union’s history. While the economic effects of NGEU have been widely studied, its political consequences for public trust remain theoretically underdeveloped. Existing research often assumes that EU-level spending generates positive political feedback by default. This thesis advances a more conditional perspective. Building on theories of policy feedback, institutional performance, and political trust, the study argues that the political effects of supranational fiscal action depend not on spending volume alone, but on how policies are implemented, perceived, and attributed. Citizens evaluate fiscal solidarity through performance signals related to...Show moreThis thesis examines how supranational fiscal solidarity shapes citizens’ trust in European Union institutions, focusing on the NextGenerationEU (NGEU) recovery instrument. The creation of NGEU marked an unprecedented expansion of the EU’s fiscal capacity and represented one of the most ambitious collective responses to a crisis in the Union’s history. While the economic effects of NGEU have been widely studied, its political consequences for public trust remain theoretically underdeveloped. Existing research often assumes that EU-level spending generates positive political feedback by default. This thesis advances a more conditional perspective. Building on theories of policy feedback, institutional performance, and political trust, the study argues that the political effects of supranational fiscal action depend not on spending volume alone, but on how policies are implemented, perceived, and attributed. Citizens evaluate fiscal solidarity through performance signals related to administrative effectiveness, credibility, and governance capacity. Where implementation is timely and embedded in effective domestic institutions, supranational fiscal interventions are more likely to reinforce trust. Where implementation is delayed, opaque, or contested, fiscal solidarity may fail to generate positive political feedback. Empirically, the thesis employs an individual-level panel design linking repeated cross-sections of Eurobarometer survey data from 2019 to 2024 with country-year measures of NGEU disbursements, public attention to NGEU, and macroeconomic conditions. Fixed-effects models exploit within-country variation over time to assess how exposure to NGEU relates to trust in EU institutions. By identifying the conditions under which supranational fiscal solidarity translates into political trust, this study contributes to debates on EU legitimacy, crisis governance and supranational service delivery.Show less

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Fiscal solidarity and public trust: citizens’ responses to the Next Generation EU