Suchergebnisse

Although talk of a 'Europe of the regions' has come and gone, regions have come to Brussels but stayed. While such mobilisation has not led to the emergence of a 'third level', regional officials in Brussels sometimes outnumber their peers from their country's permanent representation. Considering the perseverance and size of such a presence, we explore what factors best account for it. To this end, a series of multi-level models inform us about its determinants. Controlling for a number of economic and demographic factors, we find that different dimensions of regional authority matter when accounting for regional presence in Brussels. These findings stress the importance of domestic institutional factors when analysing the extent to which regions project themselves supranationally.

This research note elaborates on the role of electoral mobilization in the allocation of EU structural funding. Revising current findings on the German Länder, I show that stronghold regions with a high level of electoral mobilization receive more money. This strategy is conceptualized as 'rewarding loyalists.' The article argues that due to temporally stable turnout levels, incumbents have incentives to favor stronghold regions with high turnout rates. Hence, incumbents use differences in the level of electoral mobilization to make distributive decisions among their many core constituencies. To test for spatial interdependencies and autocorrelation, I use a spatial autoregressive model as a robustness check. Even though the data shows spatial interdependencies, the results remain the same.

Previous studies found that models emphasising legislative procedures make less accurate predictions of decision outcomes in the EU than the compromise model, a computationally simple variant of the Nash Bargaining Solution. In this journal, Slapin (2014) argues that this and other findings may be the result of measurement error. While acknowledging the importance of measurement error, we disagree with several assumptions in Slapin's analysis, and show that his results are driven by an unrealistic assumption about how policy preferences are distributed among EU decision makers. We construct simulated data that more accurately reflect the distributions of policy preferences found in existing empirical evidence and suggested by theory, and demonstrate that measurement error is unlikely to have biased previous findings. If real-world decision-making took place according to the procedural model, then it would have made the most accurate predictions, even with data containing large amounts of measurement error. While this strengthens our confidence in previous studies' findings, we explain why we should not discard procedural models.