Does Anyone Care? Cohesion Policy Issues in Sub‐national Politics

Abstract

A key element of the European Union's (EU) attempt to foster citizens' EU identification is its goal to improve citizens' quality of life via its Cohesion policy (CP). Although recent findings demonstrate that the allocation of CP money positively affects sub‐national parties' positions on EU integration and CP, we still do not know if sub‐national parties actually talk about CP issues in their manifestos. Using a unique data set based on manually coded 812 manifestos written by 95 different parties in 47 regions in Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom between 2007 and 2016, it is argued that several party‐level characteristics are decisive for sub‐national parties' emphasis of CP issues. Even though sub‐national parties emphasize CP issues only to a small degree, the results of multilevel mixed‐effects Tobit regressions show that it is particularly regional government parties which emphasize CP issues when drafting their regional election manifestos.

Time is on my side? The temporal proximity between elections and parties’ salience strategies

“…We control for several factors that are regularly considered to influence parties' issue emphasis strategies when drafting their manifestos: first, we control for a party's status of being in government or in opposition when drafting a national election manifesto (Government party). One might expect a positive effect of Government party on EU issue emphasis because (a) government parties are directly involved in EU politics via the various EU institutions (Gross, 2021), and (b) government parties tend to write longer manifestos and include more issues than opposition parties, not least because '[g]overnment parties simply have more resources available' (Dolezal et al, 2012, p. 872). The data on a party's status of being in government or in opposition are obtained from the ParlGov database (Döring and Manow, 2020).…”