Does Financial Assistance Mitigate Rural Backlash? The Case of the Common Agricultural Policy in France

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 payments from the Common Agricultural Policy, as well as their conditionalities, on the political attitudes and behaviour 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 boost turnout and curb radical right support, and that environmental policy conditionalities do not produce a backlash effect. These results shed light on an understudied social group which is central to many current policy challenges, and contribute to open a new research agenda on policy feedback in the European Union. In future iterations, we plan to complement these findings with an original targeted survey matched with individual-level administrative data on payments and interviews with farmers.