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

Abstract

Growing Euroscepticism across the European Union (EU) leaves open questions as to what citizens expect to gain from EU Membership and what influences their dissent for the EU integration project. This paper looks at EU Structural Funds, one of the largest and most visible expenditure items in the EU budget, to test the impact of EU money on electoral support for the EU. By leveraging the Referendum on Brexit hold in the United Kingdom, a spatial RDD analysis offers causal evidence that EU money does not influence citizens' support for the EU. Conversely, the analysis shows that EU funds contribute to mitigate Euroscepticism only where they are coupled with tangible improvements in the local labour market conditions. In order to gain support from its citizens, the European Union needs to produce tangible impacts, generating opportunities at the local level where these are felt the most by voters.

EU integration, regional development problems and the rise of the new radical right in Slovakia

“…Thus, a major challenge for the EU is the efficient use of the ESIF to address not only objective but also perceived needs in the underdeveloped regions (Capello & Perucca, 2019). As pointed out by Crescenzi, Di Cataldo, and Giua (2019), ESIF contribute to mitigate Euroscepticism only if they are associated with improvements in the local labour market. Similarly, Dąbrowski, Stead, and Mashhoodi (2019) found that higher volume of ESIF funds per capita reduces the negative image of the EU, but this is not the case during the period of negative economic prospects in problematic regions.…”

“…The relationship between ESIF investment and the growth of Euroscepticism has become an important European issue (Capello & Perucca, 2019). The results of Brexit's analyses did not reveal any link between the volume of ESIF in a region and the choice to leave the EU (Crescenzi, Di Cataldo, & Giua, 2019; Fidrmuc, Hulényi, & Tunali, 2019; McCann, 2019). Our results show that the volume of support from ERDF and CF has a significant positive impact on the election results of the traditional radical right.…”

“…From this perspective, the relationship between the ESIF and election results is particularly interesting. Fidrmuc, Hulényi, and Tunali (2019), McCann (2019) and Crescenzi, Di Cataldo, and Giua (2019) found that the regional support from the ESIF played virtually no role in the Brexit referendum. On the other hand, empirical results from the latest presidential election in France (Bachtrögler & Oberhofer, 2018) were opposite.…”

Do Citizens Support Cohesion Policy? Measuring European support for redistribution within the EU and its correlates

“…Here we are interested in incorporating our ideas about perceptions institutional quality 'Quality of Government' (QoG) and corruption in a multi-level structure. As recent studies have shown the limitations of utilitarian models that explain support for the EU (see Crescenzi et al, 2019), we expect our focus on perceptions of institutional quality to be salient in explaining support for EU policies, in particular in a time of diminished trust and political polarization across Europe (Algan et al, 2017). We ask respondents the extent to which the respondents perceive corruption in their own national and regional governing institutions as well as those of the European Union.…”

UK analysts’ and policy-makers’ perspectives on Brexit: challenges, priorities and opportunities for subnational areas

“…Citizens' dissatisfaction with the status quo, especially in the non-core regions of England, is very real, and the Leave campaign effectively fused their dissatisfaction with the membership of the EU (Denham, 2019). As we will see below, the 'geography of discontent ' (McCann, 2018' (McCann, , 2020, which was heavily reflected in the Leave-voting patterns, and especially in places with a local sense of being 'left behind' (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018), resulted paradoxically in economic terms of places voting against their interests (McCann, 2018), largely irrespective of the level of EU policy engagement in these regions (Crescenzi et al, 2019;Fidrmuc et al, 2019).…”