Regionalization with Europeanization? The rescaling of interest groups in multi-level systems

ABSTRACT

The European integration literature reveals differentiated patterns of Europeanization. Meanwhile, the territorial politics literature has highlighted the emergence of ‘regions with regionalism’ due to ongoing decentralization reforms. If decentralization encourages the spatial rescaling of policy communities, does it also affect the Europeanization of a region’s interest groups? To answer this question, we analyse 18 regional interest groups in three regions in Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. We find some evidence that interest groups operating in the context of more highly decentralized regions will Europeanize to a greater extent than those which do not. We call this ‘slipstream Europeanization’ as it is driven by functional and mimetic logics caused by (1) the regional government’s own Europeanization, and (2) its knock-on effect on domestic mediating factors. The results are comparable across different dimensions of Europeanization and different group-types. Overall, this exploratory study illustrates how regionalization and Europeanization processes interact at different territorial scales.

KEYWORDS:

• Europeanization
• interest groups
• multi-level politics
• regionalization
• rescaling

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the PIF Scholarship Programme from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Professor Nuria Font, Yvette Peters and JEPP’s reviewers for their support and constructive input.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Our main findings remain broadly similar when using the 2006 coding provided by Hooghe et al. (2008).

2 Figures taken from Eurostat http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat.

3 See section 5 of the web appendix for the full correlation table.

4 The low n implies that only large effects can be detected. This increases the chance of committing a type II error (i.e., a false negative).

5 Catalonia is clearly more distinctive on the identity and culture dimensions, however Wales also has a strong cultural-identity component, which is comparatively low in Tuscany. Tuscany and Wales have similar population sizes, while Catalonia stands out as much more populous. Meanwhile, the accession date to the European project similarly fails to add up to the observed Europeanization levels. In other words, these other contextual variables fail to account for the observed variation across the individual interest groups.

6 Our findings dialogue well with those of Vannoni (2015). Although his study focuses on business interests at the national level, he also finds that ‘firms in decentralised countries tend to be more active at the EU level’ (2015: 1481)

7 We provide a one-page summary of our fieldwork in section 6 of the web appendix, and a seven-page summary of our qualitative work in section 7 of the web appendix.

Additional information

Funding

PIF2008 scholarship from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [grant number PIF2008].

Notes on contributors

Facundo A. Santiago López

Facundo A. Santiago López is Third Secretary at the Argentine Embassy in the United Kingdom and affiliated to the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain.

Michaël Tatham

Michaël Tatham is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen, Norway.