Can Regional Investment Mitigate Place Resentment? A Framing Experiment

The academic literature on left-behind areas argues that they are characterised by a mix of grievances, relating to economic decline, loss of cultural pride and neglect by national politics. Governments which propose regional redistribution often aim to address these grievances, and can frame their policies to achieve this. Yet the effectiveness of these strategies in building policy support and mitigating grievance is poorly understood. We consider the case of the UK, where Levelling Up Fund investments have been framed in these various ways in political communication. With a 20,000 sample YouGov survey, we include vignettes describing the policy’s rationale in economic, cultural and political terms, and whether the respondent’s local area had been prioritised for investment. We follow these with questions on policy support and place-based anti-government grievances, and compare the effects of the treatments on these outcomes. We find that positive frames, based on pride or political recognition, can build policy support and mitigate grievances in ‘winning’ areas, but no justifying frames mitigate the damaging effects of being a policy ‘loser’.