By Daniel Raventós, Julie Wark for Counterpunch. A Europe-wide survey based on 10,000 interviews in 28 countries and in 21 languages, carried out last April by the Berlin-based company Dalia Research shows that 64% of Europeans would vote in favour of an unconditional basic income if there was a referendum. Only 24% said they would vote against it, and 12% stated they wouldn’t vote. More interesting, the results reveal a correlation between levels of awareness about basic income and support for it or, in other words, the more people know about the idea, the more they are likely to support it.
A breakdown of the results shows that the six leading EU states voted as follows: Kingdom of Spain 71%, Italy, Germany, Poland and Great Britain more than 60% and France 58%. The data from Spain coincides neatly with an earlier GESOP survey carried out in Catalonia in June 2015 in which 1,600 telephone interviews (with a sampling error of ± 2.5% and a confidence level of 95.5%) obtained a positive answer from 72% of the population to the question, “A basic income is a cash payment of 650 euros per month made to members of the population as a right of citizenship and financed by tax reforms which would mean a redistribution of income from the richest 20% to the rest of the population: would you more or less agree or disagree with this measure being introduced in Catalonia?” Given that the Dalia Research and GESOP polls were conducted completely independently of one another and almost a year apart, the congruity of the results is, to say the least, remarkable.
