SWEDISH AND LITHUANIAN TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE, FINANCED BY THE EUROPEAN UNION A quantitative analysis of urban and rural citizens’ attitudes towards the EU’s role in developing physical infrastructure

Abstract

The existing literature explains that urban and rural citizens tend to have contrasting views on the EU, with the latter being less trusting of the EU due, inter alia to experiencing economic exclusion from the EU’s Cohesion Policy. This paper analyses whether urban and rural citizens in Sweden and Lithuania differ in their views on whether it is more or less important for the EU to invest in local physical infrastructure. The results from the binary logistical regression show that Swedish urban and rural citizens differ on whether it is important for the EU to invest in local physical infrastructure, as Swedish rural citizens are less likely to believe it is less important for the EU to invest in local physical infrastructure than Swedish urban citizens, while Lithuanian urban and rural citizens do not differ in that question. This thesis also discusses how future research should look into which factors can play a bigger role in shaping attitudes towards the EU as an actor of developing local physical infrastructure, and whether the concentration of EU funds can affect the urban-rural gap in the question of whether it is important for the EU to invest in local physical infrastructure.