Can money buy EU love?

Abstract

We explore the role played by Cohesion Policy in the Brexit referendum and the subsequent 2017 general election. Although the UK has been a net contributor to the EU, some regions receive significant amounts of regional aid funds. We find that while Cohesion Policy is positively correlated with the remain vote, this relationship is weak.Most of the variation in the remain vote is explained by economic factors. In contrast, there is a robust negative correlation between Cohesion Policy and voter turnout. We estimate that had there not been this negative relationship, some 2 million more voters would have participated in the referendum, which is more than the winning margin between the remain and leave votes. Our analysis of the 2017 election suggests that Conservatives lost and Labour gained votes in the regions that benefited from Cohesion Policy, while remain-supporting regions showed gains for the Liberal Democrats.

It’s Not About the Money! EU Funds, Local Opportunities, and the Brexit Vote

“…This result reinforces the evidence obtained byFidrmuc et al (2019). By running a simple OLS analysis they find that EU regional development funds at NUTS2 level are not significantly associated with UK voters' decisions at the Referendum on Brexit.…”

“…Becker et al, 2010;, and more specifically the growing, yet still underexplored field of research linking EU funds with the public support for the European Union (e.g. Capello and Perucca, 2017;Bachtler and Mendez, 2017;Dellmuth and Chalmers, 2018;Bachtrogler and Oberhofer, 2018;Borin et al, 2019;Fidrmuc et al, 2019). The mixed evidence emerging from these recent studies leaves the issue of whether areas receiving higher proportions of EU Structural Funds develop a more favourable of Europe because of EU financial help still unsolved.…”

“…The works focusing specifically on the relationship between EU funds and Brexit Referendum have obtained mixed results. They either report a significant association, suggesting that areas receiving more money from the EU have voted Remain more (Huggins, 2018) or report no significant relationship (Fidrmuc et al, 2019). These studies, however, are performed for relatively large aggregated units (NUTS3 or NUTS2 regions) and without attempting to identify causal impacts.…”

The Meaningful Votes: Voting on Brexit in the British House of Commons

“…Second, our analysis contributes to the fast emerging literature on the causes of the Brexit referendum result itself. 1 Becker et al (2017), Arnorsson and Zoega (2018), Zhang (2018) and Fidrmuc et al (2019) use aggregate vote share results at the local authority, constituency or ward level to study the socio-economic correlates of the Leave vote share. Four groups of correlates were important.…”

“…The final group of correlates relates to the direct benefits an area has received over the years from the EU's Cohesion Fund. 2 Areas that received more money from the Cohesion Fund were moderately more supportive of Remain, but this effect is dwarfed by the fact that those areas had low turnouts in the referendum (Fidrmuc et al 2019).…”