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This book aims to answer a number of questions on solidarity through the analysis of data from an original cross-national survey conducted within the TransSOL project. How developed are solidarity attitudes and practices among citizens of European member states? How diffused are these orientations when comparing various target groups, among them refugees/migrants, unemployed people, and the disabled? And how strongly are citizens engaged in helping people outside their country, both within and outside Europe? Which groups in the European citizenry are the strongest supporters of European solidarity, and which segments exhibit distance from European or global solidarity? Studies have focused on support for redistribution to the detriment of analyses on civic and interpersonal forms of solidarity. This chapter introduces the reader to the study of solidarity, presenting and discussing available knowledge and proposing conceptualisations, measurements and explanations.

The traditional inclusive welfare regime in Denmark has over the last decade undergone important, and often unnoticed, changes. In the new millennium, welfare services have, in general, become more conditional and distinctions between various layers of need have been introduced. The inclusiveness of welfare state services has also been questioned with regard to the Europe of free movements, where the same rights apply indiscriminately to all EU citizens moving to and residing in Denmark. In this chapter, we analyze engagement in solidarity actions in support of marginalized groups within the Danish population.

The chapter investigates patterns of solidarity activity in Germany regarding the national, European and non-European level as well as refugees, unemployed and disabled people. We use multinomial regression to test a number of factors, including socio-economic variables but also subjective positioning, ideational factors, motifs and political beliefs. We find only limited socio-economic patterns and thus emphasize that solidarity is shaped by feelings of attachment. And attachment to different groups differs: it is highest towards disabled people and lowest, comparing our three issue fields, towards refugees. Our results indicate that solidarity depends not only on spatial proximity but also on social proximity. Political beliefs, too, matter as they seem to indicate deservingness of particular groups. This explains the different levels of solidarity towards the investigated groups.

Solidarity in contemporary Britain has come under pressure not only as a result of the global financial crisis and the ensuing austerity measures but also against a backdrop of constitutional volatility from the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and the vote to leave the EU in 2016. Using cross-sectional data from an original survey of 2083 UK-based individuals, this chapter uncovers how practices, attitudes, and behaviours of solidarity towards vulnerable groups are distributed in contemporary Britain. Our findings highlight specific challenges for maintaining solidarity in post-crisis Britain as we reveal both a variegated distribution of solidarity across the constituent nations of the UK and a hierarchy of solidarity towards different vulnerable groups.

Poland has been portrayed in scholarly literature as a country of low “civic” social capital and of strong familial bonds, as well as a country focused on in-group solidarity. The goal of the chapter is to shed light on the issue whether specific post-communist legacy of social capital affects solidarity practices. Adding to the literature on political solidarity, we make an insight into types of solidarity practices (protesting, donating time and donating money in order to support the others’ rights) and we investigate their geographical scope. In particular, we explore the role of bonding and bridging social capital in shaping solidarity behaviors in general and specifically its impact on transnational solidarity action.

This chapter explores the social and political dimensions of solidarity in Italy, providing new data and analyses on solidarity practices with respect to three target groups (the disabled, the unemployed, and the refugees) and explaining them with reference to social traits of the respondents, their beliefs, and their political preferences. Findings show that the most important factors fostering solidarity practices in Italy are social capital, religiosity, cognitive political involvement, and perceptions of deservingness. There are also group-related predictors of solidarity: political factors play a more important role for support towards the unemployed and above all refugees compared to support for the disabled; solidarity towards refugees is bounded by political orientations and at the same time is an unconditioned and universalistic form of solidarity.

Since 2015 the massive refugee influx has challenged European countries in terms of tackling one of the largest movements of displaced people through European borders since the World War II. Greece became the major entry point by sea receiving massive inflows of refugees and asylum seekers arriving in the Greek shores. While European leaders debated on how to deal with the refugee crisis and traditional donors delayed funding, the role of volunteers has been instrumental in covering basic and urgent needs. Based on a hybrid approach of sociological and political determinants, the study enriches the scarce empirical evidence on volunteering specifically for refugees and asylum seekers, by portraying the profiles of volunteers providing solidarity to refugees and asylum seekers fleeing repression and conflict zones to seek safety in Europe.

The chapter analyses the motivational orientations of solidarity-based behaviour and seeks to unveil if these are primarily motivated by other-regarding orientations. Conceptually, it links solidarity practices to civic and political forms of participation following previous research on voluntarism and activism. More precisely, it aims to analyse solidarity practices in Switzerland beyond volunteering behaviour. We first identify forms of solidarity and examine the socio-demographic characteristics, attitudes, social dispositions and motives of the people engaged in these forms of action. Secondly, we examine whether solidarity is based on interpersonal relationships and social proximity, differing from altruistic concerns. For this purpose, we seek to unveil whether political and civic forms of solidarity-based behaviour are similar across three vulnerable groups: migrants, unemployed and people with disability.

This chapter approaches the study of solidarity in France by comparing three important vulnerable groups, namely, the disabled, the unemployed, and refugees. The way we approach solidarity hinges on an important distinction between two different meanings of solidarity: solidarity understood as an input and solidarity understood as an output. In particular, we distinguish between two main “trajectories of solidarity”, which helps us to understand the way certain individual variables (such as self-identification and proximity) combine with political variables (like voting, an interest in politics, or the reading of newspapers) in very different ways. Our main finding is the political trajectory of solidarity can have a remarkable potential even when it comes to helping vulnerable people outside the national boundaries of the political community in France.

The concluding chapter paints a comparative picture of civic solidarity within and across European member states. For this purpose, we describe the main findings from our survey by presenting and highlighting the various levels of solidarity-driven practices and attitudes in comparative terms. Additionally, we identify the importance of European solidarity when compared to national or global solidarities in Europe. Finally, the chapter assembles the knowledge presented by the various national chapters, showing that solidarity—and European solidarity in particular—is driven by similar forces in the various countries under analysis. Overall, the chapter suggests that the idea of social citizenship becomes key for the development of European solidarity.