Buying turnout or rewarding loyalists? Electoral mobilization and EU structural funding in the German Länder

Dominik Schraff

European Union Politics, 2014, vol. 15, issue 2, 277-288

Abstract: This research note elaborates on the role of electoral mobilization in the allocation of EU structural funding. Revising current findings on the German Länder , I show that stronghold regions with a high level of electoral mobilization receive more money. This strategy is conceptualized as ‘rewarding loyalists.’ The article argues that due to temporally stable turnout levels, incumbents have incentives to favor stronghold regions with high turnout rates. Hence, incumbents use differences in the level of electoral mobilization to make distributive decisions among their many core constituencies. To test for spatial interdependencies and autocorrelation, I use a spatial autoregressive model as a robustness check. Even though the data shows spatial interdependencies, the results remain the same.

Keywords: Distributive politics; electoral mobilization; intergovernmental grants; redistribution; structural funds (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116513509308 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:15:y:2014:i:2:p:277-288

DOI: 10.1177/1465116513509308

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().