Buying Support for Unification:

This thesis argues that the funds and financial instruments of the EU Cohesion Policy are important facilitators of public opinions favorable to the EU. By using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, the results of this thesis suggest a positive effect of the EU Cohesion Policy funds on public support for EU integration and unification with regions receiving funds under the convergence objective being on average 8-15 percentage points more in favor of EU integration and unification than the control regions. This can be explained by the increased regional GDP per capita and real income level previous studies found to be the effect of the Cohesion Policy. The result is in line with literature, particularly with Massetti & Schakel that found a similar but larger effect on the funding’s effect on regional party positions towards the EU. The results are sufficiently robust to a number of different specifications and bandwidths, however the number of observations is quite low due to data availability hence one should be careful to draw any strong conclusions based on this thesis. Nevertheless, this thesis adds to the importance of the Cohesion Policy as an instrument to keep the union together and further European integration.