Does Anyone Care? Cohesion Policy Issues in Sub‐national Politics

Gross, Martin Article — Published Version Does Anyone Care? Cohesion Policy Issues in Sub‐national Politics JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies Provided in Cooperation with: John Wiley & Sons Suggested Citation: Gross, Martin (2021) : Does Anyone Care? Cohesion Policy Issues in Sub‐national Politics, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, ISSN 1468-5965, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, Vol. 60, Iss. 6, pp. 1538-1555, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13307 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/266724 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Does Anyone Care? Cohesion Policy Issues in Sub-national Politics MARTIN GROSS Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich Abstract A key element of the European Union’s (EU) attempt to foster citizens’EU identification is its goal to improve citizens’quality of life via its Cohesion policy (CP). Although recent findings demonstrate that the allocation of CP money positively affects sub-national parties’positions on EU integration and CP, we still do not know if sub-national parties actually talk about CP issues in their manifestos. Using a unique data set based on manually coded 812 manifestos written by 95 different parties in 47 regions in Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom between 2007 and 2016, it is argued that several party-level characteristics are decisive for sub-national parties’emphasis of CP issues. Even though sub-national parties emphasize CP issues only to a small degree, the results of multilevel mixed-effects Tobit regressions show that it is particularly regional government parties which emphasize CP issues when drafting their regional election manifestos. Keywords: cohesion policy; salience; manifestos; regional level; sub-national politics; parties Introduction One key strategy of the European Union (EU) to foster European integration is by improving citizens’quality of life, mitigating regional disparities, and enhancing the economic well-being of European regions via its regional policy, today known as Cohesion Policy (CP). 1 Even though CP accounts for almost one-third of the EU’s annual budget (George and Bache, 2001, p. 303), citizens’awareness of CP is only slowly increasing over the last years (Hlatky, 2021; Schraff, 2019, p. 88). Whereas there is still a huge discussion in the literature about the extent CP increases citizens’awareness of CP and their support for the EU (for example Chalmers and Dellmuth, 2015; Dellmuth and Chalmers, 2018; Dąbrowski et al., 2019; López-Bazo and Royuela, 2019; LópezBazo, forthcoming), this study focuses on political parties as important intermediary actors in the process of European integration by linking EU policies to the citizens. Parties’emphasis of European issues in supranational, national, regional, and local elections is considered as an important factor for citizens’awareness and perception of CP and EU issues (Capello and Perucca, 2019a, 2019b). Although there is a rather large literature on the salience parties devote to European issues at the (supra-)national level (for example Braun and Schmitt, 2020; Steenbergen and Scott, 2004; Whitefield and Rohrschneider, 2019), sub-national parties’emphasis of EU-related issues at the regional level has not been analysed so far. There is only a scarce number of studies dealing with party positions on and issue emphasis of EU-related issues at the sub-national level. Most 1 In the following, ‘Cohesion Policy’is used as an abbreviation for the EU’s cohesion, regional and urban policies. JCMS 2022 Volume 60. Number 6. pp. 1538–1555 DOI: 10.1111/jcms.13307 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. of these studies exclusively focus on the position-taking of regionalist parties towards EU integration (see for example Elias, 2008; Jolly, 2007; Massetti, 2009), and only two studies link sub-national parties’positional data with data on EU regional transfer money (Gross and Debus, 2018; Massetti and Schakel, 2016). Both studies provide evidence that sub-national parties are more pro-European integration oriented if the regions they are electorally competing in receive more EU regional transfer money and if they are more dependent on EU funding compared to other regions. Yet even though this empirical evidence shows that sub-national parties position themselves on EU-related issues, these studies rely on one implicit assumption which has not been empirically tested so far ― that sub-national parties actually talk about CP issues during their election campaigns, in general, and in their election manifestos, in particular. Even though Cohesion Policy issues will not be the main focus of sub-national parties’regional election campaigns, they still have incentives to talk about it (see Section I). Therefore, this study answers the following research question: To what extent do sub-national parties emphasize Cohesion Policy issues in their regional election manifestos? By using an original data set on 812 sub-national parties’regional election manifestos drafted by 95 individual parties in 47 regions in Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (UK) between 2007 and 2016, it is argued that sub-national parties’ devotion of manifesto space to CP issues is dependent on four party-specific characteristics: campaigning as government party at the regional (and the national) level; being a Eurosceptic party; being a regionalist party. The results of the descriptive and multivariate regression analyses show, first, that sub-national parties only devote 0.96 per cent of their regional election manifestos to CP issues. Second, government parties at the regional level emphasize CP issues more than other parties. Third, being a Eurosceptic or regionalist party does not explain variations in sub-national parties’varying degree of CP issue emphasis. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The next section presents the theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses why sub-national parties should care about CP issues, and why they should emphasize these issues in their regional election manifestos. The novel data set on sub-national parties’emphasis of CP (and other EU-related) issues is presented in Section II, together with a detailed description of the case selection, operationalization of variables, and empirical strategy. Section III summarizes the empirical evidence on sub-national parties’emphasis of CP issues. The final section concludes. I. Why Sub-National Parties Should Emphasize Cohesion Policy Issues: Theoretical Considerations and Hypotheses The last three decades in EU decision-making have demonstrated ‘that regions have become an unextractable and important tier of government within the EU multi-level polity’ (Schakel, 2020, p. 771). Apart from sub-national authorities’involvement in EU affairs via the Committee of the Regions and from the possibility of regional ministers for representing the EU member state in the Council of Ministers (see Schakel, 2020), particularly the important role sub-national authorities play in the formulation and implementation of European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) projects in the Cohesion Policy framework (Leonardi, 2005) should create incentives for sub-national political actors to care about CP issues. Since 1988 regional authorities play a considerable role in CP by Does Anyone Care? 1539 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. involving sub-national political actors in the decision-making and implementation processes (Brunazzo, 2016, pp. 23–4). This empowerment of sub-national authorities went along with a process of regionalisation by shifting political authority from the national to sub-national levels of government (Tatham, 2018; see also Abels and Battke, 2019). Thus, ‘regions are EU actors in their own rights’(Abels, 2015, p. 38) and sub-national parliaments do have to co-finance some of the funding programmes within the scope of ESIF (Auel and Große Hüttmann, 2015, p. 352). Consequently, political actors should have incentives to address CP issues in regional level politics (Graziano, 2010), especially since regional transfers enhance regional performance and economic convergence (see Bachtrögler et al., 2020 for additional literature). Many spending policies outlined in the various ESIF programmes are of a redistributive nature, which should not only increase citizens’awareness of these policies (Dellmuth and Chalmers, 2018), but which has also be shown to drive partisan politics at the sub-national level (see for example Kemmerling and Bodenstein, 2006; Schraff, 2019). Additionally, ‘the funds distributed to the regions via CP represent the most substantive and tangible manifestation of the EU policy for the regions’(Massetti and Schakel, 2016, p. 217). Hence, this direct influence of CP on sub-national politics provides sub-national political actors ‘with strong incentives to exercise influence in order to receive more regional funding’(Schneider et al., 2014, p. 408). Furthermore, these policies are also covered by regional media (Mendez et al., 2020) and thus should contribute to the politicization of CP issues at the sub-national level. Government Participation at the Regional and at the National Level It is particularly regional government parties that are directly involved in the formulation and implementation of CP programmes outlining in detail how ESIF money will be allocated to regional and local projects. The structure of the formulation and implementation process of CP suggests that parties participating in regional governments have a stronger incentive of emphasizing such issues than regional opposition parties. Regional government parties are the decisive players in the bargaining process on regional transfers (Chalmers and Dellmuth, 2015, p. 403). Following the first round of negotiations between the EU Commission and the national governments, the second step of negotiations is where ‘regions participate’by ‘providing their own development programmes’ (Dotti, 2013, p. 599). It is exactly in this stage where national and regional governments go through long and tough negotiations about the form of these CP programmes (Molle, 2007, p. 171). These programmes are subsequently implemented by regional governments and their administrative authorities. Therefore, it is regional government parties that allocate ESIF money in the regions through their programmes, thus giving them the additional possibility to adopt measures which could not have been financed otherwise (Dotti, 2013, p. 602). Additionally, successfully attracting ESIF transfer money to one’s region increases a regional government parties’chances of keeping electoral promises which voters care about, which in turn should incentivise these parties to highlight these specific issues in their regional election manifestos (see, for example, Matthieß, 2020). Hence, parties that currently form a regional government and their representatives are aware of the financial benefits of receiving EU money and that they could use this money Martin Gross1540 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. also ‘for personal electoral gain’(Stephenson, 2016, p. 44). This leads to the first hypothesis. H1: Regional government parties emphasize CP issues more than other parties. This relationship might be even stronger if regional government parties are also represented in the national government (Chalmers, 2013). Regional government parties have an advantage vis-à-vis regional opposition parties: they can ‘act as gate-keepers to national-level decision-making’and ‘monopolise EU-related information’(BorońskaHryniewiecka, 2017, p. 142). Taking this multi-level perspective into account, Bouvet and Dall’erba (2010) and Dotti (2016) show that national governments spend more EU money in regions which are governed by parties that also form the national government, in particular if the national government needs to secure votes in these regions (see also Dellmuth et al., 2017; Henceroth and Oganesyan, 2019; Huliaras and Petropoulos, 2016). Dellmuth and Stoffel (2012) present empirical evidence that sub-national governments in Germany allocate EU regional transfer money to local projects situated in districts where the prime minister’s party already has high electoral support (see also Surubaru, 2017). Consequently, government parties in this region are expected to talk more about the benefits of EU regional transfer money because they might have incentives to get voters’ credits for successfully using intra-party channels for a better bargaining position with the national government about financial grants (see, for example, Stefuriuc, 2009, p. 98). Hence, the second hypothesis reads as follows: H2: Regional government parties emphasize CP issues more than other parties if they are also represented in the national government. Eurosceptic Parties Arguing from an issue competition perspective, large, mainstream parties –or dominant parties (see De Vries and Hobolt, 2020) –have less incentives to politicize EUand CPrelated issues because these issues do not give them an electoral advantage vis-à-vis Eurosceptic parties and these issues are not easily integrated in the left–right spectrum that still mainly structures party competition in EU member states (see GreenPedersen, 2012, 2019; van de Wardt et al., 2014). Yet, particularly EU-related issues have been more and more politicized in European countries throughout the last decades (Hutter and Grande, 2014). This is primarily due to the electoral rise of Eurosceptic parties. One core element of their rhetoric is the condemnation of a further European integration, an emphasis of the nation state, and a rejection of the EU as a neoliberal, elite-driven project (see for example Halikiopoulou et al., 2012; Hooghe and Marks, 2009). They do not only oppose the political aspects of European integration but also the economic aspects, which are closely related to EU regional policy (Marks et al., 2002). Regarding CP issues, however, some scholars argue that Eurosceptic parties should have less incentives to politicize these issues because they do not want to increase citizens’awareness of the EU’s efforts in promoting regional development via ESIF transfer money (Capello and Perucca, 2019b). Yet, this argument could also be reversed if Eurosceptic parties Does Anyone Care? 1541 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. particularly highlight the mismanagement or misallocation of ESIF money to policy fields and societal groups they do not seem ‘worthwhile’to fund. For example, especially parties from the right side of the political spectrum combine their Eurosceptic views with distinctive positions on ‘national identity’and use ‘ethnonationalist cues’to criticize the EU for supporting marginalized groups such as refugees, migrants, and minorities (see Hlatky, 2021), thus acting as ‘political entrepreneurs’by driving ‘a wedge between coalitions and dominant parties’regarding their EU positions and issues (De Vries and Hobolt, 2020, p. 6). Consequently, Eurosceptic sub-national parties should emphasize CP issues not only in national but also in regional elections (see Ladrech, 2015, pp. 86–7) to voice their grievances regarding their (perceived) minority advancements against their (perceived) majority position (see Bustikova, 2014). Given the different theoretical expectations in the literature, I put forward two competing hypotheses regarding Eurosceptic parties’emphasis of CP issues: H3a: Eurosceptic parties emphasize CP issues more than other parties. H3b: Eurosceptic parties emphasize CP issues less than other parties. Regionalist Parties Lastly, extensive research on party families and their positions towards EU-related issues demonstrates that there are remarkable differences between party families. Whereas radical left parties and parties from the far right are much more Eurosceptic and opposed to European integration, regional, liberal, socialist and Christian-democratic parties are largely in favour of European integration (De Winter and Gomez-Reino, 2002; Hooghe et al., 2004; Jolly, 2007; Marks et al., 2002). Recent empirical findings show, however, that there has been a divide in the party family of regionalist parties regarding their positions on European integration since the beginning of the 2000s (see Elias, 2008; Massetti, 2009; Massetti and Schakel, 2021). Furthermore, regionalist parties striving for a secession adopt more Eurosceptic positions than regionalist parties campaigning for a greater degree of autonomy (Cetrà and Liñeira, 2018; Massetti and Schakel, 2021). Yet, these findings are exclusively based on regionalist parties’positioning on European integration issues, whereas this study is interested in their issue emphasis strategy regarding CP issues. Notwithstanding their concrete political ideas regarding autonomy or secession, for regionalist parties regional elections are ‘first-order’elections (even though some regionalist parties might also run for elections at the national level –for example, the German Christian-Social Union (CSU) or the Spanish Canarian Coalition (CC)), and their main political interest lies at the regional level, whereas other parties additionally have the possibility to address CP issues in other election campaigns, particularly at their ‘first-order national elections’. Therefore, I expect regionalist parties to emphasize CP issues more than other party families: H4: Regionalist parties emphasize CP issues more than other party families. Martin Gross1542 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. II. Research Design and Data To evaluate my theoretical expectations explaining sub-national parties’emphasis of CP issues, I have compiled a new data set on sub-national parties’emphasis of EU-related issues in 812 regional election manifestos (with at least 1,000 words) by 95 different parties in 47 regions in Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (that is, Scotland and Wales) from 2007 to 2016. This comprises 129 regional elections in the two EU funding periods 2007–13 and 2014–20, and at least two elections in each region. 2 The four West European countries were selected following a diverse case selection strategy to provide a wide range of variation of potentially relevant characteristics without compromising the overall comparability of sub-national parties’emphasis of CP issues in regional election manifestos. First, all countries fulfil the criteria of having regions and regional governments because parties compete in a ‘coherent territorial entity situated between the local and national levels with a capacity for authoritative decision making’ (Hooghe et al., 2010, p. 4; emphasis in original). Nevertheless, the legislative powers of sub-national parliaments in these countries, and therefore sub-national political actors’ involvement in regional politics, varies considerably (for an overview on the role of regional parliaments in the EU see Bursens and Högenauer, 2017). Secondly, all regions are involved ‘in EU economic, employment and budgetary policies’and are granted with ‘legislative powers’(Stahl and Kuby, 2015, p. 152) to a varying extent. Thirdly, the selected countries and regions vary regarding the responsibilities for administering and implementing CP (for a detailed description see Schakel, 2020, pp. 770–1). Fourthly, regions vary regarding the amount and purpose of ESIF transfer money allocated to the regions, the role regional authorities play in CP implementation (Gross and Debus, 2018, p. 600; Medeiros, 2017, p. 1264), and the regional economic growth effects associated with ESIF transfer money (Crescenzi and Giua, 2020). This variation allows for evaluating the potential effects different levels of EU regional transfer money may have on sub-national parties’emphasis of CP issues. Fifthly, the selected countries and regions also differ with regard to citizens’support of EU integration (see Aiello et al., 2019; Dąbrowski et al., 2019). Lastly, all these countries experienced the rise of Eurosceptic parties in the last years which politicized EU-related issues in domestic politics (Braun et al., 2019). A Novel Data Set on the Salience of EU-Related Issues in Regional Election Manifestos To measure sub-national parties’emphasis of both EU and CP issues in their regional election manifestos, these party-related documents have been obtained from the Political Documents Archive (Benoit et al., 2009; Gross and Debus, 2018). The documents have been manually coded by, first, extracting every paragraph in which EU-related issues are mentioned, and, secondly, assigning these paragraphs to seven EU-related categories: (i) general issues on Europe; (ii) general mentioning of EU funding; and five different EU funding categories, that is (iii) European Regional and Development Fund (ERDF); (iv) 2 Details on the parties and regions included in the empirical analysis are provided in Tables SM1 and SM2 in the Online Supplemental Material (OSM). The data covers 525 manifestos drafted for 88 regional elections in the funding period 2007–13 and 287 manifestos drafted for 41 regional elections in the funding period 2014–20. The data set additionally comprises information on the EU-related saliency in regional governments’coalition agreements, which is not used for the following empirical analyses. Does Anyone Care? 1543 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. European Social Fund (ESF); (v) Cohesion Fund; (vi) a combined category for agricultural funds comprising the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD), the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund (EAGGF), and the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF); and (vii) a combined category for fisheries funds including the Financial Instrument for Fisheries Guidance (FIFG), the European Fisheries Fund (EFF) and the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF). Even though the two latter categories comprise EU funds that are only partly covered by CP, they, first, should matter for sub-national parties because not only do the agricultural funds (also being part of the Common Agricultural Policy) and the regional and structural funds ‘account for over three-quarters of EU spending’(George and Bache, 2001, p. 303), both EAFRD and EMFF are also part of ESIF. Therefore, by considering EAFRD and EMFF this data set goes beyond the usual focus on ERDF and ESF in the CP literature. Secondly, contrary to receiving regional financial aid from CP, the entry into EAGGF ‘is not dependent on meeting the criteria of “need”, and one does not “exit”once a certain level of well-being is achieved’(Leonardi, 2005, p. 26). Hence, agricultural funds should matter for sub-national parties since all countries under study receive financial aid for their agricultural sectors. Furthermore, from the 2007–13 programming period on political actors were granted to create ‘multi-fund programmes’, which most of the time resulted in a combined use of ERDF and ESF. Therefore, the general category on EU funding also captures sub-national parties’emphasis of these multi-fund programmes. 3 Operationalization of the Dependent, Independent, and Control Variables After assigning EU-related paragraphs to the specific categories, the total number of words for each category in each document was calculated and then divided by the total number of words of a document. Based on this data, sub-national parties’emphasis of CP issues is measured as the share of a sub-national parties’document devoted to the EU funding-related categories ii–vii (CP issue emphasis). To test the effect of government status at the regional and the national level, two dummy variables (regional government party; national government party) indicate if a party campaigned as a government party (value 1) or if the party drafted its election manifesto as a non-government party at the regional or national level (value 0), respectively. The effect of being in government both at the regional and at the national level will be tested using an interaction term between regional government party and national government party. Information on parties’government status is retrieved from Gross and Debus (2018). Hypotheses 3a and 3b suggest that Eurosceptic parties should emphasize CP issues more (less) than other parties. If Eurosceptic parties express their anti-EU and anti-CP views at all political layers of a multi-level system, I argue that the concept of a ‘Eurosceptic party’is a dichotomous one, meaning that a sub-national party branch of a Eurosceptic party at the national level should not express pro-EU views in sub-national election campaigns. Even though a sub-national party branch might not be comfortable with the anti-EU views of the national party organization, it probably will rather blur 3 Coding instructions can be found in the OSM. Martin Gross1544 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. its position and try not to talk about such issues at all instead of promoting pro-EU issues. The binary variable is ‘1’for a Eurosceptic party and ‘0’for all other parties. 4 Hypothesis 4 suggests that regionalist parties should emphasize CP issues more than other party families. Regionalist parties are defined as ‘parties whose core mission includes the enhancement/defence of territorially based (regional) self-government visà-vis the state, no matter whether the extent of self-government claimed is minimal (administrative) or maximum (up to secession from the state)’(Massetti and Schakel, 2017, p. 437). The categorization of regionalist parties from 2007 onwards is based on the information provided by Massetti and Schakel (2017) and supplemented by own research to generate a dummy variable if a party is a regionalist party. 5 Issue competition between sub-national political actors is constrained by institutional, societal, economic, and geographical factors, and this is particularly the case regarding the impact of ESIF transfer money (Fratesi and Wishlade, 2017; Giordano, 2017). Due to a regions’ specific and differing needs, some regions will benefit more from ESIF transfer money than other regions. Since recent research suggests that voters reward incumbent parties for directing ESIF money to the voters’home region (Dellmuth and Stoffel, 2012; Henceroth and Oganesyan, 2019), and that sub-national parties adopt more pro-European positions the more ESIF transfer money is allocated to a region (Gross and Debus, 2018), I control for the overall sum of ESIF money allocated to regions per capita in the programming periods 2007–13 and 2014–20 (Regional ESIF money per capita) by using the data provided by Gross and Debus (2018). 6 I assume that if parties succeed in attracting ESIF money to their region, they should emphasize this in their election manifestos to get voters’credit for this. 7 Therefore, I expect to see a positive effect of Regional ESIF money per capita on CP issue emphasis. I take the natural logarithm of Regional ESIF money per capita to get a more normalised distributed variable (see also Gross and Debus, 2018; Massetti and Schakel, 2016). 8 III. Empirical Analysis In this section, I will test my theoretical expectations based on the new data set I compiled. I first present some descriptive information about sub-national parties’ emphasis of CP issues in regional election manifestos. After this, I present the results of a multivariate regression analysis evaluating the impact of partyand regional-level 4 A detailed description of the coding procedure and a list of Eurosceptic parties is provided in Table SM2 in the OSM. 5 A list of regionalist parties is provided in Table SM2 in the OSM. 6 Following Gross and Debus (2018, p. 602) I focus on the allocated money instead of actual spending of EU funding. If a region held an election in 2009, then the regional allocations are the ones for the entire funding period of 2007–13, whereas an election in 2016 receives the allocation numbers for the entire funding period of 2014–20 because the money is already allocated at the beginning of the funding period. 7 Note, however, that theoretically the reverse could also be true: if the amount of ESIF money allocated to a region is perceived by sub-national parties as being too low, these parties might have an incentive to mention these facts in their election manifestos to blame either national or European institutions for not allocating ‘enough’money to the region. 8 Note that I refrain from including the lagged value of a sub-national parties’emphasis of EU-related issues in the previous manifesto (t1) to control for the possibility that ‘some parties might have stronger tendencies to emphasize EU issues in their manifestos’(Spoon, 2012, p. 566). Unfortunately, this data is only available for all parties and regions from 2007 to 2016 and, therefore, the lagged dependent variable would only be included from the second election on within a region under study, thus dramatically reducing the number of cases in the models using the lagged dependent variable. More importantly, I argue that with regard to changing the salience of issues, parties do not face the same constraints and voter punishments as with radically changing their policy positions (Adams et al., 2004), thus facilitating the choice to not include a sub-national parties’previous emphasis of CP issues. Does Anyone Care? 1545 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Bouvet, F. and Dall’erba, S. (2010) ‘‘European Regional Structural Funds: How Large Is the Influence of Politics on the Allocation Process?’JCMS’.Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 501–28. Braun, D. and Schmitt, H. (2020) ‘Different Emphases, Same Positions? The Election Manifestos of Political Parties in the EU Multilevel Electoral System Compared’.Party Politics, Vol. 26, No. 5, pp. 640–50. Braun, D., Popa, S.A. and Schmitt, H. (2019) ‘Responding to the Crisis: Eurosceptic Parties of the Left and Right and Their Changing Position towards the European Union’.European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 58, No. 3, pp. 797–819. Brunazzo, M. (2016) ‘History and Evolution of Cohesion Policy’. In Piattoni, S. and Polverari, L. (eds) The Handbook on Cohesion Policy in the EU (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar), pp. 17–35. Bursens, P. and Högenauer, A.-L. (2017) ‘Regional Parliaments in the EU Multilevel Parliamentary System’.Journal of Legislative Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 127–43. Bustikova, L. (2014) ‘Revenge of the Radical Right’.Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 47, No. 12, pp. 1738–65. Cabeza, L., Gómez, B. and Alonso, S. (2017) ‘How National Parties Nationalize Regional Elections: The Case of Spain’.Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 77–98. Capello, R. and Perucca, G. (2019a) ‘From Cohesion Policy Implementation to European Identity’. Regional Science Policy & Practice, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 631–6. Capello, R. and Perucca, G. (2019b) ‘Citizens’Perception of Cohesion Policy: From Theory to Empirical Evidence’.Regional Studies, Vol. 53, No. 11, pp. 1520–30. Cetrà, D. and Liñeira, R. (2018) ‘Breaking-up within Europe: Sub-state Nationalist Strategies in Multilevel Polities’.JCMS’.Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 56, No. 3, pp. 717–29. Chalmers, A.W. (2013) ‘Regional Authority, Transnational Lobbying and the Allocation of Structural Funds in the European Union’.JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 51, No. 5, pp. 815–31. Chalmers, A.W. and Dellmuth, L.M. (2015) ‘Fiscal Redistribution and Public Support for European Integration’.European Union Politics, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 386–407. Clark, A. and Bennie, L. (2018) ‘Parties, Mandates and Multilevel Politics: Subnational Variation in British General Election Manifestos’.Party Politics, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 253–64. Crescenzi, R. and Giua, M. (2020) ‘One or Many Cohesion Policies of the European Union? On the Differential Economic Impacts of Cohesion Policy across Member States’.Regional Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1, pp. 10–20. Dąbrowski, M., Stead, D. and Mashhoodi, B. (2019) ‘EU Cohesion Policy Can’t Buy Me Love? Exploring the Regional Determinants of EU Image’.Regional Science Policy & Practice, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 695–711. De Vries, C.E. and Hobolt, S.B. (2020) Political Entrepreneurs. The Rise of Challenger Parties in Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). De Winter, L. and Gomez-Reino, M. (2002) ‘European Integration and Ethnoregionalist Parties’. Party Politics, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 483–503. Dellmuth, L.M. and Chalmers, A.W. (2018) ‘All Spending Is Not Equal: European Union Public Spending, Policy Feedback, and Citizens’Support for the EU’.European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 3–23. Dellmuth, L.M. and Stoffel, M.F. (2012) ‘Distributive Politics and Intergovernmental Transfers: The Allocation of European Union Structural Funds’.European Union Politics, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 413–33. Dellmuth, L.M., Schraff, D. and Stoffel, M.F. (2017) ‘Distributive Politics, Electoral Institutions and European Structural and Investment Funding: Evidence from Italy and France’.JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 55, No. 2, pp. 275–93. Martin Gross1552 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Dotti, N.F. (2013) ‘The Unbearable Instability of Structural Funds’Distribution’.European Planning Studies, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 596–614. Dotti, N.F. (2016) ‘Unwritten Factors Affecting Structural Funds: The Influence of Regional Political Behaviours on the Implementation of EU Cohesion Policy’.European Planning Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 530–50. Elias, A. (2008) ‘From Euro-Enthusiasm to Euro-Scepticism? A Re-Evaluation of Minority Nationalist Party Attitudes Towards European Integration’.Regional & Federal Studies, Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 557–81. Flash Eurobarometer (2019) Flash Eurobarometer 480. Citizens’Awareness and Perceptions of EU Regional Policy (Brussels: European Commission). Fratesi, U. and Wishlade, F.G. (2017) ‘The Impact of European Cohesion Policy in Different Contexts’.Regional Studies, Vol. 51, No. 6, pp. 817–21. George, S. and Bache, I. (2001) Politics in the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Giordano, B. (2017) ‘Exploring the Role of the ERDF in Regions with Specific Geographical Features: Islands, Mountainous and Sparsely Populated Areas’.Regional Studies, Vol. 51, No. 6, pp. 869–79. Graziano, P.R. (2010) ‘From Local Partnerships to Regional Spaces for Politics? Europeanization and EU Cohesion Policy in Southern Italy’.Regional & Federal Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 315–33. Green-Pedersen, C. (2012) ‘A Giant Fast Asleep? Party Incentives and the Politicisation of European Integration’.Political Studies, Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 115–30. Green-Pedersen, C. (2019) The Reshaping of West European Party Politics. Agenda-Setting and Party Competition in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gross, M. and Debus, M. (2018) ‘Does EU Regional Policy Increase Parties’Support for European Integration?’West European Politics, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 594–614. Gross, M. and Jankowski, M. (2020) ‘Dimensions of Political Conflict and Party Positions in Multi-level Democracies: Evidence from the Local Manifesto Project’.West European Politics, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 74–101. Halikiopoulou, D., Nanou, K. and Vasilopoulou, S. (2012) ‘The Paradox of Nationalism: The Common Denominator of Radical Right and Radical Left Euroscepticism’.European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 51, No. 4, pp. 504–39. Henceroth, N. and Oganesyan, R. (2019) ‘The Effect that Structural and Investment Funds Have on Voter Behaviour in European Parliamentary Elections’.JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 57, No. 3, pp. 599–615. Hlatky, R. (2021) ‘EU Funding and Euroskeptic Vote Choice’.Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 2, pp. 348–63. Hooghe, L. and Marks, G. (2009) ‘A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus’.British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 1–23. Hooghe, L., Marks, G. and Wilson, C.J. (2004) ‘Does Left/Right Structure Party Positions on European Integration?’In Marks, G. and Steenbergen, M.R. (eds) European Integration and Political Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 120–40. Hooghe, L., Marks, G. and Schakel, A.H. (2010) The Rise of Regional Authority. A Comparative Study of 42 Democracies (New York: Routledge). Huliaras, A. and Petropoulos, S. (2016) ‘European Money in Greece: In Search of the Real Impact of EU Structural Funds’.JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 54, No. 6, pp. 1332–49. Hutter, S. and Grande, E. (2014) ‘Politicizing Europe in the National Electoral Arena: A Comparative Analysis of Five West European Countries, 1970–2010’.JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 52, No. 5, pp. 1002–18. Does Anyone Care? 1553 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Jolly, S.K. (2007) ‘The Europhile Fringe? Regionalist Party Support for European Integration’. European Union Politics, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 109–30. Kemmerling, A. and Bodenstein, T. (2006) ‘Partisan Politics in Regional Redistribution. Do Parties Affect the Distribution of EU Structural Funds across Regions?’European Union Politics, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 373–92. Ladrech, R. (2015) ‘Europeanization and Subnational Parliaments –A Research Perspective’.In Abels, G. and Eppler, A. (eds) Subnational Parliaments in the EU Multi-Level Parliamentary System: Taking Stock of the Post-Lisbon Era (Innsbruck: Studienverlag), pp. 77–89. Leonardi, R. (2005) Cohesion Policy in the European Union: The Building of Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). López-Bazo, E. (forthcoming) ‘The Impact of Cohesion Policy on Regional Differences in Support for the European Union’.JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcms.13153 López-Bazo, E. and Royuela, V. (2019) ‘Citizens’Perception of the Cohesion Policy and Support for the European Union’.Regional Science Policy & Practice, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 733–49. Marks, G., Wilson, C.J. and Ray, L. (2002) ‘National Political Parties and European Integration’. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 46, No. 3, pp. 585–94. Massetti, E. (2009) ‘Explaining Regionalist Party Positioning in a Multi-Dimensional Ideological Space: A Framework for Analysis’.Regional & Federal Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4–5, pp. 501–31. Massetti, E. and Schakel, A.H. (2016) ‘The Impact of Cohesion Policy on Regionalist Parties’Positions on European Integration’. In Piattoni, S. and Polverari, L. (eds) Handbook on Cohesion Policy in the EU (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar), pp. 217–28. Massetti, E. and Schakel, A.H. (2017) ‘Decentralisation Reforms and Regionalist Parties’Strategies: Accommodation, Empowerment or Both?’Political Studies, Vol. 65, No. 2, pp. 342–451. Massetti, E. and Schakel, A.H. (2021) ‘From Staunch Supporters to Critical Observers: Explaining the Turn towards Euroscepticism among Regionalist Parties’.European Union Politics, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 424–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/14651165211001508 Matthieß, T. (2020) ‘Retrospective Pledge Voting: A Comparative Study of the Electoral Consequences of Government Parties’Pledge Fulfilment’.European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 59, No. 4, pp. 774–96. Medeiros, E. (2017) ‘European Union Cohesion Policy and Spain: A Territorial Impact Assessment’.Regional Studies, Vol. 51, No. 8, pp. 1259–69. Mendez, C., Mendez, F., Triga, V. and Carrascosa, J.M. (2020) ‘EU Cohesion Policy under the Media Spotlight: Exploring Territorial and Temporal Patterns in News Coverage and Tone’. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 58, No. 4, pp. 1034–55. Molle, W. (2007) European Cohesion Policy (Milton Park: Routledge). Schakel, A.H. (2020) ‘Multi-Level Governance in a “Europe with the Regions”’.British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 767–75. Schneider, E., Rittberger, B. and Wonka, A. (2014) ‘Adapting to Europe? Regional MPs’Involvement in EU Affairs in Germany’.Regional & Federal Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 407–27. Schraff, D. (2019) ‘Regional Redistribution and Eurosceptic Voting’.Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 83–105. Spoon, J.-J. (2012) ‘How Salient Is Europe? An Analysis of European Election Manifestos, 1979–2004’.European Union Politics, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 558–79. Stahl, G. and Kuby, B. (2015) ‘The Growing Role and Responsibility of Parliaments in European Integration and Economic Governance –AView from the Committee of Regions’. In Abels, G. and Eppler, A. (eds) Subnational Parliaments in the EU Multi-Level Parliamentary System: Taking Stock of the Post-Lisbon Era (Innsbruck: Studienverlag), pp. 145–54. Martin Gross1554 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Steenbergen, M.R. and Scott, D.J. (2004) ‘Contesting Europe? The Salience of European Integration as a Party Issue’. In Marks, G. and Steenbergen, M.R. (eds) European Integration and Political Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 165–92. Stefuriuc, I. (2009) ‘Government Formation in Multi-Level Settings: Spanish Regional Coalitions and the Quest for Vertical Congruence’.Party Politics, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 93–115. Stephenson, P. (2016) ‘The Institutions and Procedures of Cohesion Policy’. In Piattoni, S. and Polverari, L. (eds) The Handbook of Cohesion Policy in the EU (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar), pp. 36–49. Surubaru, N.-C. (2017) ‘Administrative Capacity or Quality of Political Governance? EU Cohesion Policy in the New Europe, 2007–13’.Regional Studies, Vol. 51, No. 6, pp. 844–56. Tatham, M. (2018) ‘The Rise of Regional Influence in the EU –From Soft Policy Lobbying to Hard Vetoing’.JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 56, No. 3, pp. 672–86. van de Wardt, M., De Vries, C.E. and Hobolt, S.B. (2014) ‘Exploiting the Cracks: Wedge Issues in Multiparty Competition’.Journal of Politics, Vol. 76, No. 4, pp. 986–99. Whitefield, S. and Rohrschneider, R. (2019) ‘Embedding Integration: How European Integration Splits Mainstream Parties’.Party Politics, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 25–35. Supporting Information Additional supporting information may be found online in the Supporting Information section at the end of the article. Data S1. Supporting Information. Does Anyone Care? 1555 © 2021 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.