Money Talks at the Polling Station? EU-Funding Conditionality and the 2023 Polish Election

After funding conditionality was introduced in 2020, the EU integration literature came to see it as the potentially game-changing instrument in the rule-of-law conflict with Poland and Hungary. That claim has rested almost entirely on supply-side assumptions, and the demand-side survey experiments have generally found limited treatment effects. The elections held in both states after the EU froze recovery and cohesion funds now allow the claim to be tested directly, since an electoral channel requires that the dispute reach voters and shape how they vote. Drawing on an election-day exit poll from the 2023 Polish parliamentary election, this paper offers the first individual-level test of whether the freeze reached vote choice. Unblocking the suspended funds was the priority voters most often named for the incoming government, ahead of accountability, security and migration, which is a striking finding in the light of the literature in which European issues rarely outrank domestic ones. Those who named it first were nearly four times the odds to vote for the pro-compliance opposition rather than parties that did not own compliance, net of their demographic profile, rather than rallying behind it as the blame-game account predicts. The design is observational, so it establishes association rather than effect, but it supplies the demand-side link the conditionality literature has assumed without testing.