Redistributive Politics in a Centrifugal Representation System: The Case of the EU

One of the main functions of centralized budgets in federal and political unions is to act as an equalizing mechanism to support economic and social cohesion. This is also the case with the European Union’s budget, which operates as a redistributive mechanism that counteracts the cross-national and cross-regional inequalities created by the single market. Despite the limits on cross-national redistribution imposed by a centrifugal system of representation, the net fiscal position of member states - what they pay to the EU budget minus what they receive from it - is very diverse, and has changed quite remarkably over the last decades. In this paper, we investigate how and why the net fiscal position of each member state towards the rest of the EU changes over time. Using a novel panel dataset (1979-2014), we study how some key national and EU-level political and economic variables affect the EU redistributive dynamics.