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ABSTRACT
Anticipating the competitive disadvantage of economically weak regions in an integrated European single market, the European Union (EU) redistributes money to alleviate economic inequalities and increase cohesion. However, the amount of European redistribution is very moderate and the recent years have shown that Eurosceptic parties gain ground, especially in economically weak areas. So is Eurosceptic voting related to an insufficient compensation of the losers of EU integration? Combining European Social Survey data with information on regional funding for 123 EU regions, I demonstrate that the probability of a Eurosceptic vote is highest under insufficient compensation. Insufficient compensation occurs among middle income regions that are cut-off from the bulk of funding due to the regional policies’ targeted approach. Moreover, some of the poorest regions miss out as well, as the more developed areas among the poor are favored in funds allocation. A taming effect of funding on Eurosceptic voting is therefore restricted to the more prosperous regions in Europe’s lagging areas.
Acknowledgements
For helpful comments, I would like to thank Frank Schimmelfennig and André Walter. I am also grateful for feedback from the whole European Union Politics research group at ETH Zurich as well as to the journal's editors and referees.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Dominik Schraff is postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Comparative and International Studies, ETH Zurich.
Notes
1 All data and code to replicate the empirical findings of this article are available at: www.dominikschraff.com.
4 The EU is aware of the problematic stance of middle-income regions. Hence, many of the regions at the middle of the wealth distribution have a so-called ‘transitional’ or ‘phasing-out’ status. Yet the amount of funding reserved for transition regions is five times smaller than the amount targeted towards the poorest areas (http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/funding/available-budget/).
5 The critical reader might wonder how the funding data could speak to survey data from 2012, which includes a retrospective voting variable. Let me highlight that the between-regional variation in regional funding is a temporally rather stable pattern that is fixed at the beginning of a funding period. Hence, from early on, it is rather clear which regions will benefit the most from the regional policy, which makes it reasonable to expect that voting reported in 2012 is informed by EU funding from the period 2007–13.
6 Put differently, I refrain from including cases that do not have the chance to show the outcome of interest. Yet whether countries have or do not have Eurosceptic parties in the electoral arena might not be completely exogenous to explanations of Eurosceptic voting. If there is endogeneity due to selection, it most likely downward biases my results (King et al. Citation1994: 130). As a robustness test, in the Appendix replicates the main finding with an extended sample, including three countries with zero variation on the dependent variable.
7 Indeed, research on both – radical left- and radical right-voting – shows that Euroscepticism is an important explanatory factor (Werts et al. Citation2013; March and Rommerskirchen Citation2015; Ramiro Citation2016).
8 This implies that one should disentangle radical left- and right-wing Eurosceptic voting if we want improve our understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Future research might pick up on these important nuances.
9 The Chapel Hill Expert Survey measures party positions over European countries. The data can be accessed at http://ches.web.unc.edu/.
12 NUTS = Nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques, for further information see http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/nuts/overview
14 See for a robustness test with a sample that includes cases with zero variation on the dependent variable.
15 Here, a potential issue is reversed causality. The fact that some regions are discriminated in EU fund allocations could be due to regional electoral outcomes (Schraff Citation2014). Hence, funding might not decrease Eurosceptic voting; rather, regions with stronger Eurosceptic voting just receive less funding for political reasons. Most likely, there is a self-reinforcing cycle of insufficient compensation, Eurosceptic voting and political targeting of EU funds. This amplifies the issues highlighted in this article, and suggests that more effective redistribution, as well as more funding, is needed.