Same Game but More Players? Sub-national Lobbying in an Enlarged Union

Abstract

This contribution builds on the insights provided by the literature on sub-national mobilization in the European Union (EU) to assess whether the 2004–2007 rounds of enlargement have changed anything in this respect. Empirical analysis uses two types of data sources. The first is a survey of over a 100 regional offices in Brussels, and the second consists of 29 semi-structured interviews with Commission officials led in the aftermath of the 2004–2007 enlargements. These data are used to answer the following two research questions: (1) is there a ‘new’ versus ‘old’ cleavage at the territorial level in Brussels? (2) Is there anything like an ‘enlargement effect’ on sub-national mobilization? Analysis reveals that, while there is fading evidence of a ‘new’ versus ‘old’ cleavage in Brussels, enlargement has nevertheless had an impact on sub-national mobilization at the EU level, reinforcing older but also newer trends.

Key Words:

• Regions
• lobbying
• enlargement
• European Union

Notes

¹ Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

² Malta and Cyprus are excluded from the analysis. Croatia joined too recently (July 2013) to be included.

³ I define a region as the level of government and/or administration immediately below the state level.

⁴ For the opposite viewpoint, see Mbaye (2009, 13).

⁵ Unrepresented countries are micro-states such as Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta, or highly centralized ones such as Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece and Slovenia.

⁶ A total of nine activities were available to choose from.

⁷ Changing the prior proportions from the default (regions assumed to be equally distributed among the categories, hence 50:50) to the true distribution in the sample (73% in EU-15 and 27% in EU-10) does not change the overall number of misclassified regions.

⁸ Interview with a DG Agri senior official, March 2009.

⁹ Other mechanisms such as new powers to the Committee of the Regions or the revision of the subsidiarity principle are discussed elsewhere (Tatham, 2014).