Blue signs on the road: European Union funding and citizens’ feelings towards membership¹

The European Union (EU) is a world in itself, with a wide variety of areas of intervention, policies and programmes. Among these, not only do EU structural funds - European Structural and Investment Funds, in their current designation - play an important part, they constitute moreover EU’s main investment policy as well. This chapter makes two contributions to existing literature. First - and since the Handbook of European Integrations’ rationale is on neglected topics in the field - it uncovers a potentially niche area and contributes to existing research on EU funding and its relation to European citizens’ feelings towards EU membership. Second, it outlines the connection between EU funding and support for EU membership by analysing the amount of funding received in connection with the turnout in European Parliament elections. The first section sums up the history of EU funding, while the second focuses on the empirical analysis.