A recent study by Irina Ciornei (TransDeM-UAB) examines how justice principles shape public support for EU-level social policies—an often overlooked mechanism in the literature. Using TESS (2016) data from 13 European countries, the study analyses support for a uniform EU welfare system and for EU schemes on unemployment, pensions, and health care. The findings show that equality and need are the strongest predictors of support, while differences across welfare regimes play a limited role; instead, national context conditions how citizens apply their justice beliefs to supranational solidarity.
The article starts from a puzzle in the Social Europe debate: despite growing scholarly attention to what drives support for EU-level welfare policies, we still know relatively little about the normative yardsticks citizens use when deciding what “fair” supranational solidarity should look like. The central question is therefore: do distributive justice principles structure support for EU social solidarity, and if so, which ones matter most across different welfare domains?
To answer this, Zsófia S. Ignácz and Irina Ciornei (TransDeM-UAB) develop a framework centred on the three classic distributive justice principles—equality, need, and equity—and test how these translate into preferences for a multidimensional set of EU welfare proposals: equal access to health care, decent living standards for the elderly, support for the unemployed, and even a hypothetical uniform European welfare state. Empirically, they rely on the TESS (2016) survey across 13 European countries, modelling both individual-level predictors (including identity and ideology) and national context.
Their main finding is straightforward but consequential: equality and need emerge as the strongest and most consistent predictors of support for EU solidaristic policies, outperforming many “usual suspects” in the literature once controls are included. By contrast, equity (merit/contribution) plays a weak or non-significant role overall, with only limited domain-specific exceptions.
Finally, the paper shows that differences between welfare regime types explain relatively little of the variation in how justice principles operate. Instead, country-specific contexts—especially economic conditions—seem to shape how citizens apply their justice beliefs when endorsing supranational solidarity. The broader contribution is to reframe EU social policy attitudes as not only interest- or identity-driven, but also deeply anchored in fairness conceptions about what Europeans owe each other across borders.
Reference:
Zsófia S. Ignácz, Irina Ciornei; Social solidarity and justice principles in the European Union. European Societies 2026; doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/EUSO.a.88
This paper is available in open access.