Does Anyone Care? Sub-National Parties’ Emphasis of EU Issues

Political parties at the regional level are important intermediary actors in the process of European integration by linking the European Union’s (EU) regional policies to the citizens. European regions are important units in the EU multi-level system since they are the target of the so-called Cohesion Policy (CP). CP is designed to financially support regions and cities with the overall goals of improving citizens’ quality of life and fostering their EU identification. Since CP accounts for almost one third of the total EU budget, regional parties should care and talk about EU issues. Yet, we do not know if and to what extent parties at the regional level emphasise CP issues during election campaigns. I address this research gap by analysing novel comparative data on the salience of CP issues in sub-national parties’ election manifestos in Germany, Spain, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom between 2007 and 2017 By manually coding sub-national parties’ emphasis of different EU Structural and Investment Funds (ESIFs) that lie at the heart of CP, I demonstrate that sub-national parties overwhelmingly emphasise general EU issues rather than specific ESIFs, though to a varying degree between and within countries. Estimations of linear-mixed effects models show that sub-national parties’ emphasis of EU issues is mainly driven by regional-level rather than party-level characteristics. The findings are complemented with an analysis of sub-national government parties’ emphasis of EU issues in coalition agreements in Germany. The results have important implications for explaining European citizens’ only implicit and cursory CP knowledge.