EU funding policies may be undermined by regional authorities using structural fund allocations to win votes at the local level

More than half of the EU budget is dedicated to Structural Funds, which are allocated across EU regions with the aim of promoting economic and social development. Lisa Dellmuth, Michael Stoffel and Dominik Schraff write that the use of decentralised authorities to allocate structural funding can create substantive problems for the EU’s policy goals. They illustrate that the distribution of funds often reflects local political concerns, with districts that support the regional government’s party receiving disproportionate shares of funding.