Dominik Schraff

How does labour market disadvantage translate into political behaviour? Bringing together the literatures on political alienation, redistribution preferences and insider-outsider politics, we identify three mechanisms by which labour market disadvantages influence voting behaviour. Disadvantages can increase support for redistribution, reduce internal political efficacy or lower external political efficacy. This translates into support for pro-redistribution parties, vote abstention or support for protest parties. Using the Dutch LISS survey, we observe a twin effect of increased support for redistribution and decreased external efficacy. Mediated through redistributive preferences, we find a positive effect of labour market disadvantage on voting for left parties. Mediated through external efficacy we find a positive effect of labour market disadvantage on protest voting. In contrast, we do not find any effect of labour market disadvantage on internal efficacy. Hence, the observed effect of labour market disadvantage on political abstention is entirely mediated by external efficacy.

This research note elaborates on the role of electoral mobilization in the allocation of EU structural funding. Revising current findings on the German Länder, I show that stronghold regions with a high level of electoral mobilization receive more money. This strategy is conceptualized as ‘rewarding loyalists.' The article argues that due to temporally stable turnout levels, incumbents have incentives to favor stronghold regions with high turnout rates. Hence, incumbents use differences in the level of electoral mobilization to make distributive decisions among their many core constituencies. To test for spatial interdependencies and autocorrelation, I use a spatial autoregressive model as a robustness check. Even though the data shows spatial interdependencies, the results remain the same.

Recent years have witnessed increasing scholarly interest in the domestic use of European Union (EU) Structural Funds for pork barrel projects. While regional governments are commonly ascribed a significant role in the domestic implementation of the EU budget, their influence on the local allocation of Structural Funds should be limited when regions lack own revenues necessary to co-finance Structural Funds. Hence, under unitary government, national governments should be in control of the political targeting of local projects. Using a statistical analysis of an original data set on local Structural Funds allocations across 202 local districts and 41 regions in Italy and France from 2007 to 2013, we demonstrate how national governments use EU funds for pork barrel projects in semi-presidential and parliamentary systems. The results contribute to the literature on resource distribution in the EU and further our understanding of the influence of regional government on European and international policy outcomes.

There is a classical literature in political economy arguing that negative labour market experiences, such as unemployment, might depress political participation and political interest. Political psychologists have found, however, that political participation and interest become habitual and are therefore resilient to change over the life course. In this perspective, labour market experiences should have a stronger effect on participation and interest, if they occur at a young age, that is, during the "impressionable years". In this paper, we use panel data and within-case estimation to analyse the effect of unemployment on political interest, which is a hard test for the hypothesis, because political interest is generally found to be very stable over time. We show that unemployment indeed has a negative effect on political interest among young labour market entrants. This negative effect, we demonstrate, is primarily the result of the important role of political socialisation in the workplace, because the negative effect is particularly strong among young labour market entrants scoring low on extraversion. As extraverts generally have larger social networks, they are less dependent on their political socialisation in the workplace.