Citizen Perceptions of Fairness in European Asylum Governance: Drivers and Coherence

The distribution of asylum-seekers across EU member states is a key issue of contention in European asylum governance. Scholars have developed different fairness principles that can be used to distribute protection obligations among states. But we have limited knowledge of how citizens think about distributive fairness in asylum governance and what fairness principles they support. For the legitimacy of European Asylum Policy, it is important that the public perceives it as fair, and that this perception can be based on a broad consensus across countries. In this study, we explore the question whether there is a potential consensus among European citizens on the fair distribution of asylum-seekers, or whether there remain fundamentally divergent opinions between countries and/or specific social groups. Using an extensive and fine-grained battery of different principles of distribution and governance authority, we tapped the fairness perceptions in a new large-scale survey of European citizens in six EU member states. The findings allow us to examine the potential contours of a European consensus on what a fair distribution might involve. They also help us to chart the main political division lines and whether these are primarily driven by country-specific characteristics or by transnational factors.