A Question of Fairness? National Welfare Institutions and the Politics of Free Movement in the European Union

The free movement of workers is one of the fundamental freedoms of the European Union, yet the conditions under which it occurs have been subject to considerable political debates between EU Member States in recent years. Under the current rules for free movement, EU citizens enjoy the unrestricted right to move and take up employment in any other EU country and – as long as they are ‘workers’- are given full and equal access to the host country’s national welfare system. Over the past few years, a number of EU Member States have proposed restrictions on EU workers’ access to welfare benefits. In a joint letter sent to the European Council in 2013, the Ministers of Interior of Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK called for a review of paying social security benefits to recently arrived EU migrants who had never been employed in the host country before. In 2017 and 2018 the Ministers of Labour of Germany, Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Austria sent letters to the European Commission that called for restrictions on child benefits for EU workers with children in another EU Member State. Apart from these letters, we know surprisingly little about the national policy positions of the 28 Member States on whether and how to restrict welfare benefits for EU workers. By ‘national policy positions’ we mean policy preferences expressed in discussions with other EU Member States. We know even less about the actual causes of the disagreements on this issue between EU countries. Most existing explanations of why some Member States prefer new restrictions while others want to keep the current rules focus on the role of national actors such as populist political parties and the media. We argue that it is equally important to consider also the potential role of more structural factors, especially cross-country differences in national welfare institutions. We hypothesise that the characteristics of national welfare institutions, especially the degree of ‘reciprocity’ built into them, can have important effects, not only on public attitudes to free movement (see Mårtensson, Österman, Palme, and Ruhs 2019) but also on Member States’ national policy positions on reforming free movement. This paper, then, has two aims. The first objective is to identify all EU Member States’ national policy positons on whether and how to reform the current rules for the free movement of workers in the EU. The second objective is to explore the reasons for Member States’ divergent preferences on this issue, with a particular focus on the role of cross-country differences in national welfare institutions. To examine these issues empirically, we use a novel index of institutional reciprocity in welfare institutions and draw on data obtained from a new survey of national policy-makers in all EU Member States. The survey, conducted by us in late 2019, is the first of its kind and provides the basis of more comprehensive analysis of EU Member States’ policy positions on free movement than has so far been possible given the piece-meal data and evidence available.