In this session, Brian Burgoon (Professor of International and Comparative Political Economy, University of Amsterdam) presents his co-authored paper on Radical and Mainstream Party Orientations and Voter Support for European-level Unemployment Assistance. This work is co-authored with David van der Duin and Francesco Nicoli.
This paper explores the role of partisanship in shaping individuals’ support for European-level Unemployment Risk Sharing (EURS), unemployment assistance that explicitly combines and reconciles multi-level, European- and national-level assistance. Studies of European social policy have unearthed inconsistent patterns of voter support for European-level social provisions, while most studies exploring party orientations and social policy focused on national- rather than EU-level assistance. This study explores data from a survey experiment on how differences in citizens' party orientations – intention to vote for a given radical or mainstream party family – shape support for European level Unemployment Risk-sharing (EURS) in thirteen EU countries. We expect and find modest differences across party families in support for the generosity, financing, social-investment conditionality, redistributive, and national-versus-EU-level administration of EURS. We also expect and find an inverted U-shaped relationship between left-to-right partisanship on the one hand, and generous, redistributive, social-investment oriented and EU-administered EU-level unemployment assistance on the other: Voters aligned with mainstream parties of the centre left and centre right support such a Social Europe, while voters aligned with the radical left and, particularly, radical right parties are significantly less supportive.
Discussant: Mariana Carmo Duarte: PhD researcher, EUI
About the speaker:
Brian Burgoon is Professor of International and Comparative Political Economy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He received his PhD from MIT in 1998, and between 1998 to 2000 was Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He joined the UvA faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2000, was appointed Professor in 2012, and served as Academic Director of the UvA's Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) from 2014 till December 2020. Brian Burgoon's research focuses on global economic integration; social policy and welfare state development; and democratic political representation. The key goal of that research is to understand how the politics of these realms relate to each other, and in particular whether and how global connectedness, social protection, and democracy can be rendered compatible or even mutually reinforcing.
Hybrid event. The link to the session will be provided following registration.