{"title":"EU transfers and euroscepticism: can’t buy me love?","authors":"A. Borin, E. Macchi, Michele Mancini","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiaa028","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates whether EU redistributive policies improved the public attitude toward European integration, both in terms of public opinion and in terms of political preferences. We build a new dataset combining data from the European Social Survey, different data sources for political parties’ stances and transfer records from EU institutions. We focus on the regional Cohesion Policy, within which the Convergence Objective program offers a quasi-experimental framework that allows us to single out these effects by means of a regression discontinuity approach. Results show that EU transfers have mitigated the rise of Eurosceptic attitudes and reduced the political consensus for anti- EU parties in long-time recipient regions. We estimate that increasing the regional per capita EU transfers by 1000€ over the 2000-2014 period reduces the share of Eurosceptic individuals by about 8 percentage points and voters’ support for anti-EU parties by 10 percentage points. The effects are homogeneous across different socio-economic groups, including the most disadvantaged ones. Other attitudes that are often associated with Euroscepticism (i.e. anti-trade and anti-immigration stances) are not substantially affected by EU regional transfers.","PeriodicalId":43996,"journal":{"name":"Ekonomicheskaya politika","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2020-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/epolic/eiaa028","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Ekonomicheskaya politika","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiaa028","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
This paper investigates whether EU redistributive policies improved the public attitude toward European integration, both in terms of public opinion and in terms of political preferences. We build a new dataset combining data from the European Social Survey, different data sources for political parties’ stances and transfer records from EU institutions. We focus on the regional Cohesion Policy, within which the Convergence Objective program offers a quasi-experimental framework that allows us to single out these effects by means of a regression discontinuity approach. Results show that EU transfers have mitigated the rise of Eurosceptic attitudes and reduced the political consensus for anti- EU parties in long-time recipient regions. We estimate that increasing the regional per capita EU transfers by 1000€ over the 2000-2014 period reduces the share of Eurosceptic individuals by about 8 percentage points and voters’ support for anti-EU parties by 10 percentage points. The effects are homogeneous across different socio-economic groups, including the most disadvantaged ones. Other attitudes that are often associated with Euroscepticism (i.e. anti-trade and anti-immigration stances) are not substantially affected by EU regional transfers.
期刊介绍:
Ekonomicheskaya Politika is a broad-range economic journal devoted primarily to the study of the economic policy of present-day Russia as well as global economic problems. The subject matters of articles includes macroeconomic, fiscal, monetary, industrial, social, regulation and competition policyand more. The journal also publishes theoretical papers in such areas as political economy, general economic theory, welfare economics, law and economics,and institutional economics.. The character and the scope of economic problems studied in many publications require a multidisciplinary approach, consistent with the editorial policy of the journal. While the thematic scope of articles is generally related to Russia, the aim of editorial policy is to cover politico-economic processes in the modern world and international economic relations, as well. In addition, Ekonomicheskaya Politika publishes Russian translations of classical and significant modern works of foreign economists.