The geography of EU discontent

EU Cohesion Policy can't buy me love? Exploring the regional determinants of EU image

“…In this case we found that the importance of these two factors was stronger than that of those that have an EU‐wide influence on EU image, however, they played a role for the negative EU image in some regions only, while being insignificant in others. This finding adds to those from previous studies associating positive attitudes towards the EU and its Cohesion Policy with higher education levels (Chalmers & Dellmuth, ; Dijkstra et al, ; Osterloh, ); however, our results indicate that low education matters for negative EU image only in some clusters of European regions. More research is needed on this to elucidate why there is such a regional differentiation of the importance of this factor.…”

“…We found that low education levels are related to more negative EU image only in a part of European regions, however, the effect of this variable is strong. Again, this does resonate with previous research low educational educational attainment to Euroscepticism (e.g., Hakhverdian et al, ) or anti‐EU voting (Dijkstra et al, ). However, the regional and spatial perspective that we adopted allowed for a more nuanced understanding of this relationship.…”

“…Our analysis indicated that the citizens' EU image tended to be worse in regions with high unemployment, but also those where the economic situation worsened significantly as a result of the post-2008 economic crisis, with declining purchasing power of citizens and rising unemployment. This finding chimes with the insights from previous research on the surge of anti-EU sentiment in regions where economic situation worsens (thus not necessarily poor regions), where the citizens may be inclined to blame the EU for this negative turn of events and vote for anti-EU parties (Dijkstra et al, 2018), albeit our dependent variable was the negative image of the EU, rather than voting behaviour.…”

“…Concerning migration, previous research focusing on the EU and Brexit brought contradictory results, pointing that exposure to migration was a factor that drove “leave” vote in the 2016 British referendum on the EU (Goodwin & Milazzo, ) or, on the contrary, that it had little explanatory power (e.g., Becker et al, ) for the voting patterns in that referendum. By contrast, we adopted a pan‐European perspective and, nuancing the insights from the study by Dijkstra et al (), we found that migration was associated with negative EU image, at least in some European regions. Such as for the education factor, more research is needed to explain these regional patterns.…”

“…Hypothesis 4 Regions with higher immigration rate inhabitants are more negative about the EU Last but not least, there is an emerging literature linking the surge in Eurosceptic and populist attitudes and voting to resentment about one's place being left behind in a context of growing economic polarization across territories and policy focus on investment in places that already are "winners" of globalization processes (Dijkstra, Poelman, & Rodríguez-Pose, 2018;Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). These often peripheral, de-industrializing, rural and/or shrinking regions tend to witness a rise in populist vote and anti-EU sentiment.…”