Partisan politics in regional redistribution: do parties affect the distribution of EU structural funds across regions?

Abstract:

The current debate on the role of regional politics in the European Union (EU) is dominated by approaches that focus upon either intergovernmental bargaining or multi-level governance. Because Structural Funds are the main EU-wide redistributive policy, we propose to apply the traditional literature on partisan politics and national redistribution to the case of the EU. We use a new data set on both the distribution of Structural Funds across regions and the distribution of vote shares for different factions of the European Parliament. These data provide empirical details for some of the partisan competition that takes place at the regional level. Specifically, we show that the traditional left vs. right cleavage can have an impact on the size of regional transfers.