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are in favor of a stronger role of the EU is social policy, and determine if their
positions bear any link to the patterns of Europe's geography of inequality. A
more careful scrutiny of the left panel in
Figure 4.9
offers interesting insights on
this issue, insights that combine expectable results with rather counterintuitive
ones.
Among the countries supporting a stronger role of the EU in the develop-
ment of social policy two subgroups emerge: countries that are both relatively
poor and equal, and countries that are relatively wealthier and more unequal.
Similarly, among the countries that during the constitutional process opposed
any alteration of the status quo or even wanted to limit any possible future
EU social policy initiative, one can also distinguish two subgroups: countries
that are relatively wealthier and more equal, and countries that are relatively
poorer and more unequal.
The behavior of relatively equal countries matches intuition perfectly: in the
absence of stark distributive conflicts within the nation, poorer countries will
see the extension of the EU's social policy as a venue to extract more resources
even if, partially, at the expense of sharing policy. Likewise, the behavior of
rich and equal countries also fits the predictions of the model, and is perfectly
consistent with earlier results. The same countries in which dependents and
left-leaning parties oppose social policy expansion in EU are the countries
that during the constitution-making process showed less than tepid support
for a rather minor delegation of power to Brussels. In line with the model's
predictions, the poor among the rich do not want to share their tax base with
the rest of the poor in the Union. Accordingly, the parties mobilizing them do
not pursue that route, and the governments, traditionally controlled by Social
Democracy in rich and equal countries (Iversen and Soskice
2006
), oppose
alterations of the status quo during the constitution-making process.
The behavior of relatively unequal countries, on the other hand, seems puz-
zling. Why do poor and unequal countries object to an expansion in European
social policy? And, similarly, why would rich and unequal countries see it
favorably? Admittedly, there may be many reasons beyond economic geogra-
phy that bear some influence on these choices, but I would argue that these
positions become less of a mystery if, in line with the argument, one considers
the interplay between interpersonal and interregional redistribution in the EU.
To that effect, the right panel of
Figure 4.9
presents a slightly different model
of EU leaders' preferences over social policy. The variables of interest here are
income inequality and, instead of just the average income in society, the net
balance in EU structural funds perceived during the period before the Con-
stitutional Convention. This variable provides a direct measure of the levels
of inter-regional redistribution, that is, inter-country redistribution within the
EU, (T in the model). Interestingly enough, and notwithstanding some excep-
tions (like Spain after the election of Zapatero as head of the government),
there emerges a strong negative relationship between being a net recipient of
EU transfers and the resilience to advance a common system of interpersonal
redistribution in the Union. This unwillingness to pursue such a course of
