Leveraging, Capture and Resistance. Local Adaptation of discourses on European Cohesion Policies

In this paper, we address the issue of resistance as the attempt of local political discourses to maintain their autonomy within larger discourses. We are interested in how local discourses can maintain a partial segregation in respect to specific issue fields. What we are interested in is how discourse changes by shifting from lower to higher levels of locality. We do so by analysing discourses in the context of European cohesion policies. Cohesion policies utilize more than one third of the budget of the European Union to facilitate the converge of economic development of European regions. Overall, this research setting allows to investigating how discourse on cohesion policies modifies as it shifts from national to regional media. We investigate how at regional level the discourse is innervated by idiosyncratic topics that reflect contextual framing and interest structures. Empirically, our work addresses a key concern: how it is possible that awareness of such an important financial effort by EU is so low especially in the regions that benefit the most from the programme