The impact of subnational interests on supranational regulation

Abstract

The article assesses the influence of subnational interests on supranational regulation within the broader effort of the European Union (EU) to include diffuse interests in the policy process. I track 60 legislative proposals initiated by the European Commission between 1996 and 2007 and estimate the change made in response to the requests of the body representing decentralized interests – the Committee of the Regions. I find that the Commission responds favorably to requests more than a third of the time and that substate politicians are more influential on proposals dealing with regional cohesion. The data also show that the policy importance of the amendments is the main predictor of the Commission's willingness to accept the advice of subnational governments. Furthermore, the Commission, being a non-elected and technocratic body, is more likely to hear the policy preferences of local and regional stakeholders when the public expresses dissatisfaction with EU democracy.

Keywords:

• Committee of the Regions
• EU
• European Commission
• local and regional governments
• subnational interests
• transnational representation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the National Science Foundation (SES-0720139) and the Indiana University's EU Center of Excellence data collection award. She would like to thank Evan Ringquist, James Perry and Beate Sissenich for their support and advice throughout this work. She is also grateful to the participants at the 2008 meetings of the International Conference of the Council for European Studies and the Midwest Political Science Association, as well as the three anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

The study adopts a definition of democracy as accountability and representation.

From the opening speech of Luc Van den Brande, now President of the CoR, at a seminar of regional ombudsmen in London, 2006.

Warleigh (1999) explores the issue of what the constituency of the CoR is and finds that ‘members generally consider themselves to represent the subnational government of their country as a whole’.

For simplification, both the Commission and the Committee are treated as unitary actors.

To identify mandatory referrals, I used the ‘Chronological Update of Opinions Adopted by the Committee of the Regions’, which also lists the raporteur, the responsible internal commission and whether the opinion was adopted with unanimity or majority.

The list of selected proposals is available upon request.

I gathered all legislative from PreLex and the EU's archives. The follow-up reports were obtained directly from the Commission.

To decide on the policy importance of the amendments, I relied on my discussions with officials from the Commission and the CoR in the summer of 2007.

Opinions delivered from January to June were paired with the first issue for the year; those from July to December were matched with the second issue.

I drew 10,000 bootstrapped re-samples (n = 60) from the original data and the coefficients were calculated from each re-sample. I computed a sample mean and deviation to graph the empirical distributions of the coefficients (available upon request).

Future research evaluating the effectiveness of other democratization measures can prove if this claim has broader validity.