All Hands on Deck' or Separate Lifeboats? Public support for European Economic Solidarity during the Covid-19 pandemic

What are the sources of public support for international aid in times of crises? This paper<br> investigates the determinants of public support for the EU Covid-19 aid package (’NextGenera-<br> tionEU’, NGEU), the largest aid package in EU history. We show that although public support<br> for within-EU redistribution is influenced by long-standing factors such as ideology and citizen<br> identities, endorsement or opposition cues taken from elite actors are important determinants<br> of public support for aid in times of crises. Conversely, the effects of policy details about the<br> aid package are more mixed. Using what is to the best of our knowledge the first EU-wide<br> study on public opinion on the Covid-19 rescue package, our vignette experiment shows that<br> short-term shifts in support for the rescue package are driven mostly by elite endorsement<br> cues rather than information about the precise terms of aid or amount. We also find that the<br> role of elite endorsement cues varies across different subsets of the population depending on<br> their level of political sophistication, national level attachment and country context. Thus, in<br> the face of multidimensional decision-making in times of crises, national institutions are key<br> catalyst of moving short-term support for policies of international solidarity. We discuss how<br> our findings have implications for democratic governance and accountability in the EU.