Suchergebnisse

Literature on substate mobilization in Europe has provided some useful insights into the factors and mechanisms shaping territorial interest representation in Brussels. Although recent studies have enhanced our understanding of the determinants of cooperative and bypassing paradiplomacy, those underpinning conflict have remained rather obscure. Using a new data set with information on more than 100 substate offices in Brussels, this article sheds some light on the determinants of conflict between member state diplomacy and substate paradiplomacy. It argues that they are very different from those of bypassing and cooperation and that resource richness and diplomatic accreditation significantly affect its frequency. These findings not only are robust to multilevel modeling and nonparametric bootstrapping but also are of theoretical import as they highlight that devolution and party political incongruence fail to affect the frequency of conflict in Brussels. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Although the determinants of territorial mobilization at the level of the European Union (EU) have been examined since the 1990s, the analysis of the interaction between regional and state interest representation has been rather neglected. This article focuses on a single policy area – environmental affairs – in order to evaluate the impact of policy-specific preference intensity (salience) on state–region relationships in Brussels. Using original survey data, I demonstrate that greater salience tends to increase cooperative interest representation and to decrease state-bypassing interest representation. This finding shows how important salience configurations are in the strategic interactions between state and non-state players in the EU arena.

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. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]