The Clash of the Policies: The Joint Effect of EU Cohesion Policy and Common Agricultural Policy on the Public Support for European Integration

Abstract

A vital element of the European Union (EU) political system is the idea of further European integration. Whilst most existing works investigate the effects of the Cohesion Policy (CP), only a handful of studies consider the effects of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on citizens' support for European integration. In this contribution, I argue that these two largest EU redistribution policies neutralise each other in their effects on the citizens' support for European integration: the CP improves public support due to its positively perceived redistributive nature and positive externalities, whilst the CAP decreases public support due to due to a limited target audience, somewhat elitarian distribution of resources and bureaucratic complexities. Using regional-level CP and CAP data for 2017 and Eurobarometer surveys for 2018 and 2019, the empirical findings of multilevel regressions show that the CAP counteracts the positive effects of the CP on citizens' support for further European integration. The findings are robust to including a wide range of control variables, sample size change and alternative specifications of key independent variables. These findings also hint that policy evaluations should not disregard the differences between various policy instruments.