Enrique Lopez-Bazo (p), Vicente Royuela (p)

Monica Mihaela Tudor

See extended abstract

Roberta Capello , Giovanni Perucca (p)

Enrique Lopez-Bazo

Every year, about one third of the Communitarian budget is devoted to regional policies aimed at fostering territorial development and, more in general, improving EU citizens’ quality of life. As a consequence, Cohesion policy should represent an extremely powerful tool for promoting EU values.
Two specific characteristics of Cohesion policy, however, make us assume its impact not to be homogeneous across regions.
The first peculiarity is that, compared with other EU programs, Cohesion policy can take very different forms, from the provision of a transport infrastructure to the incentive for R&D activities to the training of unemployed people, based on the necessity of the region where they are implemented. The perception of EU policies, and as a consequence citizens’ identification with EU values, crucially depends on the matching between these regional needs and the objectives of Cohesion policy actions.
The second point concerns the fact that their implementation is directly managed by regional governments, which makes the policy outcome varying according to the effectiveness of local institutions in reaching their objectives. Policy settings with higher institutional quality are expected to provide better policy outcomes and, therefore, to promote both citizens’ satisfaction with Cohesion policy and their identification with the EU values.
The scope of this work is therefore to build a framework for the understanding of the mechanisms through which these two specific characteristics of the local implementation settings are expected to mediate the effect of Cohesion policy implementation on citizens’ perceptions.
An analysis of EU regions will add empirical support to the conceptual assumptions.

Monica Mihaela Tudor (p), Violeta Florian

Giovanni Perucca

see extended abstract