Subnational Views on Multilevel Politics: The Role of European Institutions in Norm Generation and Diffusion

The revitalisation of European integration in the late 1980s and early 1990s was accompanied by an increasing involvement of subnational authorities, embodied by a stronger regional policy with larger structural funds, and by the establishment of the Committee of the Regions. These developments led to the emergence of multilevel governance as one of the central concepts to describe the European political system. Furthermore, the rising activity of subnational authorities is not limited to European integration, as it can be observed in the case of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities becoming an official organ of the Council of Europe. While these bodies have today a stable position in their institutional settings, their overall political significance, especially for a systemic transformation, seems still peripheral. This paper addresses this apparent discrepancy between the institutional durability and the political significance of the representative organisations of subnational authorities in Europe: why do they persevere, or what role do they play within the larger institutional architecture of major European organisations? A sociological institutionalist hypothesis is proposed to answer this question, with an emphasis on the role of institutions in generating and diffusing norms favouring a multilevel, as opposed to state-centric, political system. In this sense, political actors participating in these institutions are more likely to accept those norms that envisage a larger place for subnational authorities in European politics. The hypothesis is tested with data from a survey that was conducted with 649 local and regional politicians from 11 Western European countries in 2015. Respondents include political actors with current, past or no experience in European institutions, making it possible to test whether such experience is associated with positive views on a multilevel political system. Multivariate analyses, controlling for a number of attitudinal factors, show that a statistically significant relationship exists between European institutional experience and positive views on multilevel politics. The analysis is repeated on a split-sample of respondents who are highly motivated for international positions, yielding positive results, which show that the relationship is not merely due to the self-selection of individuals who take up these positions. With these findings, the paper offers a contribution to the institutionalist analysis of European politics focusing on norm generation and diffusion, for which it is difficult to demonstrate institutional effects at the individual level of analysis. It also contributes to the literature on multilevel governance by highlighting the role of formal institutions in addition to networks and informal practices.