The fourth paper focuses on the level below the member states. Hitherto, the transfer of authority to the local and regional level – and the role of the local level in both formulating and implementing decisions taken at the EU level – has not been much discussed in the literature on the new member state. Regional and local authorities in member states constitute the last link in the chain of implementation of EU law, and therefore also constitute the citizens’ primary and daily contact points for many EU policies. These developments connect to the wider argument in the literature that the role of the state has changed from one in which it has a profound policy ambition to one in which it is more concerned with monitoring regulations. While the degree of decentralization is partly determining where the implementation and monitoring takes place, the member state theory literature has been silent about the role of the sub-state level.
The process to decentralize authority is not limited to the Swedish case. At least in the other Nordic countries similar processes are going on (Bergman and Strøm, 2011). In an era of neoliberalism and individualization the state has an incentive to delegate the responsibility to the sub-state level. When political decision-making is increasingly taking place in the institutions in Brussels, sub-state actors both point some of their attention directly to the EU level, and are at the same time directly responsible for implementing and monitoring new regulations and directives. This merits a further investigation into how this phenomenon connects to the wider theoretical argument.
In this paper we ask the following research questions: How do the stronger position of the sub-state level influence the functioning of the political system? How have local and regional political authorities accommodated to this new role as integral parts of the EU system? And to what extent are failures to adjust at the local and regional political level leading to political decisions (as argued by Bickerton, for the state level) being increasingly taken by bureaucratic actors? We study this by analyzing how local political representatives and civil servants understand and exploit their new political power and room for maneuver, both in their policy formulation and policy implementing capacity, and how variations in their practices affect the relationship between political authorities and society.
This increased local/regional power also have importance for the vertical relationships within the multi-level system. What characterized the former nation state (at least in Sweden) is that the locus of political power was situated with the state authorities in the national capital. Although the formal constitutional rules have not been altered in this respect, the political practice gives a different picture. The ways in which regional and local authorities have adapted to their new role is therefore also to a large extent having an effect on state-society relations at the national level and arguably also for EU-society relations.
