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Buying Turnout or Rewarding Loyalists? : Electoral Mobilization and EU Structural Funding in the German Länder
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2013-11-14
Author(s)
Abstract
This paper elaborates on the role of electoral mobilization in the allocation of EU structural funding. Revising recent 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'. I argue 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.
Language
English
Keywords
EU structural funds
intergovernmental grants
pork barrel politics
electoral mobilization
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
No
Book title
PSA Conference 2013
Publisher
Political Studies Association
Publisher place
London UK
Start page
20
Event Title
PSA Comparative European Politics Annual Conference 2013
Event Location
Glasgow
Event Date
14.-15.11.2013
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
227377