In the last decades, the EU started to engage more actively in social policy making. However, little attention is paid to how citizens perceive this development of ‘Social Europe’. Whereas some Europeans feel threatened by the opening of national boundaries, others consider it as an opportunity. Cross-national research on public support for European social policy instruments is currently lacking. Using data of the European Social Survey 2016 – including 18 EU countries – we are able to investigate Europeans’ attitudes towards the implementation of an EU-wide social benefit scheme for the poor. Both individual and country level explanations for citizens’ support are investigated. At the individual level, we include socioeconomic status, welfare attitudes and Euroscepticism as the main explanatory factors. At the country level, we focus on the extensiveness of national welfare states. It is assumed that in strong welfare states, citizens are less likely to support an EU-wide social benefit for the poor, because they are already covered by extensive social provisions at home. Citizens living in less generous welfare states might be more supportive towards an EU-level social benefit, as they expect an upwards convergence in social protection levels. The micro-macro linkage is further unraveled by analyzing whether individual level factors are conditioned by national context. Most notably, the composition of so-called winners and losers of integration is likely to vary across EU countries. In less developed welfare states, lower socioeconomic status groups may be the ones most supportive towards an EU-level social benefits – as they seek for more extensive social protection – whereas in advanced welfare states, they may be the least supportive towards an EU-wide social benefit, which can threaten the redistributive mechanisms that determine their life chances. The survey data are empirically analyzed using a multilevel framework.
