Money Talks at the Polling Station: EU-Funds Conditionality and the 2023 Polish Election

In October 2023, Poland's Law and Justice (PiS) government lost office after eight years in power, shortly after the European Union froze the country's recovery funds in response to rule-of-law disputes. A growing literature on EU conditionality argues that supranational pressure may produce electoral effects in backsliding member states, but the claim has rested almost entirely on supply-side evidence. This paper provides the first individual-level demand-side test, using a 2023 Polish election-day exit poll, complemented by regional analysis of PolNES data. Voters who named the unblocking of EU recovery funds as the most pressing problem for the next government had roughly tripled odds of voting for the opposition coalition rather than for PiS, conditional on age, education, gender, area of residence, and religious practice. The effect concentrates among regularly practising Catholics, the demographic stratum structurally most resistant to opposition mobilisation, where the frame more than doubles the predicted probability of opposition vote. At the regional level, voivodeship-level cohesion-fund exposure does not predict opposition vote share once individual demographics and religion are controlled. EU conditionality's electoral effect in 2023 Poland operated through public framing rather than through regional material exposure. The findings provide the first individual-level evidence that EU sanctions can travel through domestic electoral channels in backsliding states, identifying framing, rather than felt economic cost, as the operative mechanism, with implications for how supranational actors can support democratic resilience where domestic checks have weakened.