Abstract:
Despite state resilience and the waning of the ‘Europe of the Regions’, European
integration persists in affecting subnational actors. Subnational actors have
maintained lobbying offices in Brussels to access European Union institutions
while others have continued to organize around regionalist parties in the
European Parliament. This study explores whether and how EU membership
has influenced decentralization. I argue that states exposed to
Europeanization, candidates and members of the EU, decentralize more
compared to non-EU states. Quantitative tests using recent data on regional
authority and three case studies of France, Poland, and Spain provide support
for this argument. This article contributes to the research on Europeanization
and multilevel governance by focusing on state-level motivations for
decentralization. This study’s findings allude to the need of examining how
other facets of European integration affect subnational actors and
investigating variations in decentralization between EU member-states.