To nurture social and economic cohesion, the EU has, over the past decade, invested more than 500 billion Euro in regional development funds (‘Structural Funds’) in local projects in the EU. Projects are selected by regional authorities and have to be ‘leveraged’ with domestic funds. In this paper, we seek to explain what motivates the local allocation of Structural Funds across projects. We develop and test hypotheses about regional authorities’ selection of projects using new constituency-level data on project funding and a number of political, institutional, and economic variables in Italy and France (2007-2013). Comparing countries with different electoral systems enables us to draw conclusions about how features of the electoral system shape regional authorities’ motivations to use EU funds to win votes rather than to further EU goals. The results have broader implications for our understanding of the strategies and impact of regional authorities in implementing EU regional policy.
