Replication Data for: The Political Geography of the Eurocrisis

The European Union (EU) provided a two-faced response to the 2008 financial crisis: on the one hand, it refused to pursue fiscal integration through a common budget; on the other, it introduced significant horizontal transfers designed to produce financial stabilization. We analyze this response as the outcome of a democratic constraint on EU leaders. Given the EU's current institutional structure, citizens' preferences pose a binding constraint on what leaders can do, as they determine the scope of risk pooling among members and the degree of political tolerance for different courses of action. We show that these preferences reflect both differences in the geography of income and differences in production regimes and their institutional organization. The heterogeneity of constituencies' redistribution preferences associated with a diverse economic geography helps explain why the political constraints on national governments prevent them from engaging in further fiscal integration. By contrast, cross-unit externalities shift the preferences of citizens who are potentially exposed to negative side effects and open up the possibility of efforts towards international redistribution. We analyze these two mechanisms and present novel empirical results on the determinants of preferences for fiscal integration and international redistribution in the aftermath of the Eurocrisis.