Structural Funds are the most intensively used policy instrument by the European Union to promote economic growth in its member states and to speed up the process of convergence. This paper empirically explores the effectiveness of European Structural Funds by means of a panel data analysis for 13 countries in the European Union. We show that - on average - Structural Funds are ineffective. For countries with a 'proper' institutional framework, however, Structural Funds are effective. The latter result is obtained for a wide range of conditioning variables, such as openness, institutional quality, corruption and indicators for good governance. It is robust to a wide range of robustness tests. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

Structural funds are the most intensively used policy instrument by the European Union to promote economic growth in its member states and to speed up the process of convergence. JEL codes: F35, F36, O11, O40, O52, R58

The politics of innovation involves displacements between various interrelated settings ranging from the context of design to the context of use. This variety of settings and their particular qualities raise questions about the democratic implications of displacements, which have been addressed within science and technology studies for decades from different perspectives and along various theoretical strands. This article distinguishes five different traditions of conceptualizing the relation between technological innovation and democracy: an intentionalist, a proceduralist, an actor—network, an interpretivist, and a performative perspective. They differ in their concepts of “technology,” “politics,” and “democracy”; they imply different roles for the analyst and they suggest or urge other political means. It is suggested that spelling out the differences and similarities between the five perspectives creates the possibility to overcome the limitations of any particular perspective of technology and democracy.

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