The Impact of Cohesion Policy on Regional Differences in Support for the European Union*

Abstract

Cohesion Policy is a core policy of the European Union, the main objective of which is to address uneven economic growth across the EU by promoting balanced and sustainable development.Given its characteristics, it certainly has a great impact on the daily life of European citizens and can compensate population groups and places less favoured by the implementation of the internal market and economic and monetary union. As a result, Cohesion Policy is expected to shape regional support for European integration. This study tests this assumption using regional data for the EU-28 in a period that includes the recent phases of expansion and recession, in a scenario characterized by growing anti-EU rhetoric. The results suggest that a greater amount of EU funds spent in the region does not stimulate support for the Union. However, an appropriate temporal distribution of the resources allocated to the region could have a positive effect. Keywords: cohesion policy; attitudes towards the EU; structural funds; EU regions *This paper is a result of the PERCEIVE project, funded by the EC under the call H2020-REFLECTIVE-SOCIETY-2015. Grant Agreement number: 693529. I thank colleagues of the PERCEIVE team, particularly Vicente Royuela, for useful discussions, and the reviewers and the editor-in-chief for constructive suggestions and encouragement. 1 Bachtler et al. (2013) and Bache (2014) provide a comprehensive description of EU Cohesion Policy.

Invisible social Europe? Linking citizens’ awareness of European cohesion funds, individual power resources, and support for the EU

“…Duch and Taylor (1997) found no positive correlation between regional development funds per capita and aggregate support for the EU across the years 1983 to 1989. This result has been recently matched by López-Bazo (2022), who found that a greater amount of EU funds spent in a region does not stimulate support for the Union over time when the socio-economic context is considered. By contrast, Dąbrowski et al (2019) identified a positive association between the size of the regional European Structural and Investment Funds and the image that residents have of the EU.…”

“…Moreover, no consideration has been given so far to the intermediate dimensions that plausibly mediate the effect of programme awareness on individual support for the EU (that is, box E and arrows 5 and 6 in Figure 1). This could explain the inconclusive results to which research on the impact of the EU CP on support for the integration project has come (for example, López-Bazo, 2022). A first stream of empirical research focused on the macro-macro link only (arrow 4), by simply aggregating individual attitudes towards the EU at the regional level.…”

“…However, the EU seemingly fails to win the hearts of the left behind and of EU citizens more broadly. Although research on the matter has reached mixed results, a recent study found a negligible effect of the intensity of CP on the degree of regional support for the EU: citizens’ perception of the European project is not nurtured by the amount of EU funds spent in the region where they live (López-Bazo, 2022). In other words, even though the EU devotes a consistent part of its (however limited) budget to programmes aimed at enhancing social cohesion and inclusion, little credit goes to the EU directly for its efforts in the social sphere (Madama, 2019).…”

A Multi-Level β Convergence Analysis for Romania in a European Framework

“…Cieślik and Wciślik (2020) studied the CEE-8 convergence to the EU-15 and among them and find out that inside CEE-8 there is convergence since between CEE-8 and EU-15 there is no convergence, except convergence to France and Germany. The cohesion policies are having a wide positive result in terms of growth and employment, not only on the disadvantaged regions or less developed, but the impact is not the same, there are consistent differences (Crescenzi and Giua, 2020;López-Bazo, 2021). The positive effect is visible on the CEE countries as new EU members (Dyba et al, 2018).…”

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

“…Even though CP accounts for almost one‐third of the EU's annual budget (George and Bache, 2001, p. 303), citizens' awareness of CP is only slowly increasing over the last years (Hlatky, 2021; Schraff, 2019, p. 88). Whereas there is still a huge discussion in the literature about the extent CP increases citizens' awareness of CP and their support for the EU (for example Chalmers and Dellmuth, 2015; Dellmuth and Chalmers, 2018; Dąbrowski et al ., 2019; López‐Bazo and Royuela, 2019; López‐Bazo, forthcoming), this study focuses on political parties as important intermediary actors in the process of European integration by linking EU policies to the citizens.…”