Local responses to European Integration: patterns of Europe-related activities of German local governments

ABSTRACT

Europeanisation situates local governments in a constantly changing environment, bringing challenges, opportunities, and constraints. These circumstances raise the question, how local authorities adapt to the process of European integration, face its challenges, and use its diverse opportunity structures. The article explores four dimensions, through which Europeanisation hits the ground of local government: downloading, uploading, dissemination, and horizontal networking. It examines the distribution of different types of Europe-related activities at the local level using data from a survey sent to all 396 independent cities, towns, and municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Our empirical analysis provides an overview of the most and least frequent Europe-related activities within the different types of local authorities. The findings of our multivariate analysis shows that next to the direct affectedness by Europeanisation, the municipalities’ capacities in terms of financial and institutional resources have a major influence on their efforts towards Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Europeanisation
• European integration
• local government
• opportunity structures
• structural funds
• urban governance

Acknowledgements

We thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions helped to improve and clarify this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2022.2105840.

Additional information

Funding

The work was partly supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [01UG2108A].

Notes on contributors

Benjamin Gröbe

Benjamin Gröbe is a research assistant at the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer. His research focuses on the Europeanisation of political systems and policies.

Stephan Grohs

Stephan Grohs is professor of Political Science at the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer and Senior Fellow of the German Research Institute for Public Administration. Research focuses on subnational politics and administration in a comparative perspective. This involves administrative organisation and reforms at the regional and municipal levels as well as the analysis of policy areas such as social and environmental policy.

Jan Porth

Jan Porth is a senior associate in the field of public sector consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers GmbH WPG. Prior to this position, he worked as a research assistant at the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer and as a research associate at the German Research Institute for Public Administration.