Place-Based Policies and Political Discontent: The Mediating Role of Local Spending Programmes

Recent Italian parliamentary elections have revealed individuals’ growing populist attitudes, expression of widespread political discontent. Place-based policies and national spending programmes might play a role in shaping voters’ behaviour and political consensus. Within this context, we exploit the outset of a novel Italian Strategy, aimed to boost development in peripheral areas to investigate this relationship. Besides, we set a quasi-experimental framework using municipal-level data on Italian national elections in 2013 and 2018, and we apply a semi-parametric matching difference-in-differences. The findings suggest that place-based spending programmes mediate the revealed discontent with different magnitudes depending on geographical heterogeneity and previous expenditure levels.