Local Public Investments and Heterogenous Electoral Responsiveness Across Demographic Groups

Recent research shows that the decline of public services provision such as school or hospital closures, that particularly affect so-called “left-behind” places, leads to stronger support for far-right parties. Conversely, increasing local investments is frequently proposed as a means to mitigate political discontent. Emerging evidence, such as studies on e.g. European Cohesion Policy Funding, tends to support this view, albeit the effectiveness of such interventions and their political impact may be constrained by limited individual awareness of these investments or by adverse distributional effects, which can attenuate their political impact. In addition, it is still unclear who changes their political attitudes in response to infrastructural investments and whether different types of public goods spending result in different responsiveness among affected groups. This study builds on economic voting theory, combined with insights from the literature on political socialization, to shed light on these questions. First, I expect that individuals are more likely to react politically to local spending that their group benefits from the most. Second, I argue that older individuals are generally less likely to adjust their attitudes and electoral behavior in response to local public investments because their shorter time horizons imply lower expected future returns from such investments, and, more importantly, because their political views and perceptions of their region as “left behind” by the political elite are more entrenched and shaped primarily by past developments rather than by current or anticipated improvements. Empirically, I combine geocoded individual-level panel survey data from Germany with regional statistics and hand-collected data on local infrastructure investments (renovation of municipal facilities in the areas of sport, youth, and culture, as well as hospital renovations), and employ a difference-in-differences design with individual and time fixed effects to estimate heterogeneous effects on political attitudes of these local spending types across age groups. This detailed examination of local public investments advances our understanding of how – and for whom – the provision of public goods and services influences political attitudes and has the potential to alleviate the geography of discontent.