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in the Union's economic geography and the preferences of political actors. I
pay particular attention to the left of the political spectrum as the source of
any potential demand for a centralized system of redistribution.
The study of the impact of economic geography on citizens' preferences
builds on a combination of individual and country level data capturing different
political and economic aspects of EU member states. 14 The dependent variable
in the analysis is an ordinal measure of support for the integration of welfare
systems in the European Union. The question reads as follows:
Today, each European Union Member State is responsible for its own social welfare
system. To what extent would you be in favor or opposed to the harmonization of social
welfare systems within the European Union?
The survey records four possible answers to this question:
(1) Strongly in favor;
(2) Somewhat in favor;
(3) Somewhat opposed; and
(4) Strongly opposed.
I evaluate the probability that individual respondents choose one of these four
categories as a function of both individual and country level variables capturing
specific aspects of the economic geography of the Union. The specification of
the model is:
+ β 3 Inq Gdpc
WH
= β 1 Inq
+ β 2 Gdpc
+ β i φ + χ i θ + ε
(1)
where WH captures attitudes towards welfare harmonization at the EU level
as defined above, Inq and Gdpc stand, respectively, for the level of income
inequality and GDP per capita in each of the members of the Union, and Inq
Gdpc stands for the interaction between the two. In turn,
β i φ
and
χ i θ
capture
a set of country (
). I estimate equation (1)
via maximum likelihood in the context of a mixed model (with individuals and
countries) in which the link function is specified to be an ordinal logit, thus
accounting for the nature of the dependent variable.
The country level controls include the following two variables: a measure
of the net budgetary balance per capita of each country in the EU, to capture
the relative position of each country as a net recipient (contributor) in the
system of interregional redistribution in the Union (a topic to which I return
in the next section), an indicator of Union members' effort in active labor
market policies; and countries' average unemployment rates between 2000 and
2005. These variables control for the heterogeneity in labor market conditions
associated with the uneven geography of risk, a factor known to shape social
policy preferences (Cusack, Iversen and Rehm 2006 ). As individual controls,
φ
) and individual level controls (
θ
14
I obtained the individual level data from the ICPSR Study 20321: Eurobarometer 65.1, The
Future of Europe , February-March 2006. I provide a detailed account of the definition and
sources of the variables used in this section in Appendix B.
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