Why regional spending does not affect support for the European Union

It is usually assumed that spending by the European Union translates into greater support for the EU among those who benefit from that spending. Empirical work has, however, produced mixed findings as to the association between the EU’s regional development spending and EU support. To better test this relationship, we link a unique dataset on EU spending in Wales at a hyper-local level to survey panel data that measures EU support at, and in the years following, the Brexit referendum. Using this novel data, we find no evidence of an association between spending and various measures of EU support. We demonstrate that this is, at least partially, due to the fact that very few people know of spending in their local area, and that this knowledge is itself only weakly related to amounts of spending. We further show that views of spending are largely driven by perceptual biases rather than actual spending. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the drivers of EU support, but also the effect of public spending on attitudes more generally.