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Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography
# 20.40
Does cohesion policy reduce EU discontent and Euroscepticism?
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose & Lewis Dijkstra
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Euroscepticism?%
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Andrés#Rodríguez-Pose
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and#Lewis#Dijkstra
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Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics. Corresponding
author.
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DG Regio, European Commission
Abstract: Some regions in Europe that have been heavily supported by the European Union’s cohesion
policy have recently opted for parties with a strong Eurosceptic orientation. The results at the ballot box
have been put forward as evidence that cohesion policy is ineffective for tackling the rising, European-
wide wave of discontent. However, the evidence to support this view is scarce and, often, contradictory.
This paper analyses the link between cohesion policy and the vote for Eurosceptic parties. It uses the
share of votes cast for Eurosceptic parties in more than 63,000 electoral districts in national legislative
elections in the EU28 to assess whether cohesion policy investment since 2000 has made a difference
for the electoral support for parties opposed to European integration. The results indicate that cohesion
policy investment is linked to a lower anti-EU vote. This result is robust to employing different
econometric approaches, to considering the variety of European development funds, to different periods
of investment, to different policy domains, to shifts in the unit of analysis, and to different levels of
opposition by parties to the European project.
Keywords: Euroscepticism, anti-system voting, populism, cohesion policy, elections, regions, Europe
JEL codes: D72, R11, R58
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Introduction
Between 2014 and 2020 the European Union (EU) spent almost one third of its budget – or €351.8
billion – “in order to support job creation, business competitiveness, economic growth, sustainable
development, and improve citizens’ quality of life” in its regions and cities (European Union, 2014).
Most of this investment in cohesion policy – through the combination of the European Regional
Development Fund (ERDF), the European Social Fund (ESF), and the Cohesion Fund – has been
targeted at creating jobs and growth in the less developed areas of the Union, by actively investing in
improving people’s skills, supporting small and medium-size enterprises and start-ups, reinforcing
research and innovation capacities, improving transport and telecommunications infrastructure, and
tackling environmental problems. In many parts of Europe, the EU has become the major investor in
economic development.
However, while the EU is conducting this huge development effort, many European citizens are turning
their back on European integration. The Brexit vote in the UK may be the most extreme expression of
the rising discontent with the EU. However, the UK is not the exception. Over the last decade and a
half there has been a growing distrust of the European project across many parts of Europe. According
to different Eurobarometer surveys, in the mid-2000s only one quarter of the European population
tended not to trust the EU. By the late 2010s – and one long economic crisis later – the share of European
citizens expressing doubts on the European project had reached 45% of the population.
Riding on this populist wave, the rising distrust of the EU is being gradually translated into votes.
Between 2013 and 2018 13.4% of voters in the EU cast their vote in national legislative elections for
parties that are either strongly opposed or opposed to European integration. If parties that want a
moderate rollback of the European agenda are considered, the share of the vote for Eurosceptic parties
rises to 26.7% (Dijkstra et al., 2020).
The surge of anti-system voting, in general, and Euroscepticism, in particular, has attracted considerable
attention. Individual factors, such as age, education and wealth, have featured prominently in scholarly
research as drivers of anti-system voting (Goodwin & Heath, 2016; Hobolt, 2016; Ford & Goodwin,
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2017; Essletzbichler et al., 2018; Gordon, 2018). So have interpersonal inequality (Rodrik, 2018) and
rurality (Essletzbichler et al., 2018; Martin et al., 2018; Gordon, 2018). However, more recently a
different strand of literature has adopted a more territorial stance. The rise of populism and
Euroscepticism is, according to this opinion, intrinsically related to long-term economic and industrial
decline (Martin et al., 2018; Rodríguez-Pose, 2018; Dijkstra et al., 2020). From this perspective, if
territorial decline is the cause, more investment in development should be the solution. It is, therefore,
posited that “development policies for lagging and declining areas offer the most realistic and viable
option [to curb the rising discontent]” (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018: 206). Hence, “if Europe is to combat the
geography of EU discontent, fixing the so-called places that don’t matter is possibly one of the best
ways to start” (Dijkstra et al., 2020: 751). This implies that generating viable and solid development
strategies for places lagging behind and/or suffering long-term economic decline should represent one
of the soundest options to combat the wave of discontent and resentment against European integration
(Dijkstra et al., 2020; Iammarino et al., 2019).
This is to a large extent what the EU aims to do with the one third of its budget targeted to the promotion
of economic development across the continent. Yet, the paradox is that many of the places that benefited
the most from European cohesion policy seem to be part and parcel of the discontent with – or
resentment towards – European integration. This is, for example, the case of many of the major
recipients of European funds in the UK. The EU channelled through cohesion policy a considerable
amount of resources to Cornwall during the period between 2007 and 2013. However, Cornwall and
the Isles of Scilly voted by a sizeable majority to exit the EU (Dustmann et al., 2017: 10). The share of
Cornish voters opting for Brexit was 56.5%, with only two districts in the county voting to remain
(Willett et al., 2019: 6). Similarly, in South Yorkshire, which between 2000 and 2006 received the
highest level of support in the UK from the European Cohesion policy, 62% of voters chose Brexit (Di
Cataldo, 2017: 815).
The negative connection between EU support and Euroscepticism is, however, not only limited to the
United Kingdom and to Cohesion policy. In Poland, a strong correlation has been detected between EU
agricultural support and hostility at the ballot box towards the EU (Hartnett & Gard-Murray, 2018).
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Indeed, the number of studies that find no relationship whatsoever between EU spending, in general,
and cohesion policy investment, in particular, and support for the EU is large. Most of the studies
reaching this conclusion concern the Brexit vote. Neither Becker et al. (2017: 626-627), nor Huggins
(2018) or Fidrmuc et al. (2019) find any relationship between European transfers and votes to remain
in the EU, meaning that “the role of EU regional spending in the outcome of the UK’s 2016 EU
referendum was minimal” (Huggins, 2018: 393). In Poland it was found that “EU agricultural funding
may drive higher rates of Eurosceptic voting by reducing positive feelings for the EU among recipients”
(Hartnett & Gard-Murray, 2018: 18). As put by Fidrmuc et al. (2019), it seems that money can't buy
EU love.
Despite these strong assertions, the role of EU expenditure – if at all – in the rise of Euroscepticism
remains understudied. Most assessments of the link between the territorial allocation of EU funding and
Eurosceptic voting patterns are anchored in national case studies – and, most notably, in UK research
linked to Brexit. The very limited number of studies posing the question from a European dimension
(e.g. Borin et al., 2018; Schraff, 2019) generally rely on large territorial units and survey data, rather
than on real electoral outcomes. This means that, for the whole of the EU, whether investment in
regional development and territorial cohesion has attenuated the rise of Euroscepticism remains an open
question.
This is precisely what this paper aims to achieve: to assess whether greater levels of cohesion policy
investment in creating jobs and growth, improving human capital, innovation and accessibility, and
protecting the environment, among other things, have stemmed the ascent of Euroscepticism or, by
contrast, have been irrelevant in this respect, or even fuelled it.
The approach adopted in the paper moves the analysis forward relative to other studies that have tackled
a similar topic from a European-wide perspective (e.g. Borin et al., 2018; Henceroth and Oganesyan,
2019; Schraff, 2019) on a number of counts. First, with more than 63,000 electoral districts covered in
all 27 member states of the EU plus the UK, the paper is far more comprehensive in its geographical
coverage than anything that has been attempted so far. Second, it considers differences between the