Against the backdrop of rising spatial inequalities, place-sensitive policies have become an increasingly popular instrument to support rural and “left behind” areas. Current studies tend to focus on regional policies and analyse only the impact of funding. Yet, people’s experiences with a policy may vary substantially within a region, and other policy characteristics may also affect political attitudes. This paper aims at overcoming these limitations by studying the effect of individual payments of the Common Agricultural Policy, as well as their conditionalities, on the political attitudes of French farmers. Based on original administrative data on CAP funding at the cantonal level matched with national and European election results, we find that an increase in funding can increase turnout and depress radical right support. Instead, we do not find a consistent effect of the share of environmental policy conditionalities. In future iteration, we plan to complement these findings with interviews with farmers and an original targeted survey matched with individual-level administrative data on payments. These results shed light on an understudied social group which is central to many current policy challenges, and contribute to opening a new research agenda on policy feedback in the European Union.

Chair: Tim Vlandas (St Antony’s College, Oxford)