3. Multilevel Politics in Europe

Thsi chapter considers territory in European politics. The idea is that policy-making in Europe acts like a system of multilevel governance. Here, policy authority which exists at the national level, is increasingly being shared with institutions at the supranational European Union (EU) level and by regional governments at the subnational level. The chapter also looks at concepts such as pooling, delegation of policy authority, federalism, and decentralization. Although we tend to think of nation-states as the building blocks of modern politics, more and more, this chapter agues, we must consider how these so-called building blocks interact with each other and also what they themselves are made up of. This is where the term multilevel governance is relevant. This term characterizes the complex relationship of policy authority between political actors situated at different territorial levels of governance.

Foundations of European Politics

Foundations of European Politics introduces important tools of social science and comparative analysis. The first part of the book acts as an introduction to the topic, looking at democratic politics and multilevel politics in Europe. The second part moves on to citizens and voters, considering issues related to ideology and voting decisions. Part III looks at elections and introduces electoral systems and direct democracy, representation, political parties, and party competition. The next part is about government and policy. The last part looks at the rule of law, democracy, and backsliding.

Factors of Coalitional Governments Formation Between Regionalist and Nationwide Political Parties in Regions of Spain

Received 09.09.2020. The paper focuses on one of the most significant arenas of multi-level politics – the interaction between regionalist and state-wide parties in the creation and functioning of government coalitions at the regional level. The research is aimed at determining the factors influencing the creation of such coalitions in which regionalist parties act as coalition partners with a specific agenda. Spain provides significant empirical material for research on this issue, where regionalist parties function in most regions, and state-wide parties often enter government coalitions with them at the level of autonomous communities. A comparative analysis of the practices of concluding coalition agreements between statewide and regionalist political parties in the regions of Spain during the democratic period is a key research method. The theoretical part of the article provides an overview of the theories of party coalitions accumulated by Political Science since the 1950s and updated by researchers due to actualization of new circumstances in the context of multilevel politics. The empirical part of the article examines the influence of three categories of factors on the construction of coalition deals between regionalist and state-wide political parties in the Spanish autonomous communities, including: the size of the coalition, the ideological inter-party distance (comprising the regionalist-ideological dimension) and correspondence of the alignments of party forces at the regional and national levels. The research demonstrates that the factor of coalition size is fundamental for transactions between regionalist and state-wide political parties, while the other two categories of factors manifest themselves situationally. Acknowledgements. The research was carried out at the expense of a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 19-18-00053 " Subnational regionalism and dynamics of multilevel politics (Russian and European practices)") at the Perm Federal Research Center of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Trade Policy in Multilevel Government

Trade Policy in Multilevel Government investigates how multilevel polities organize openness in a globalizing political and economic environment. In recent years, the multilevel politics of trade caught the broader public’s attention, not least due to the Wallonian regional parliament’s initial rejection of the EU-Canada trade deal in 2016. In all multilevel polities, competencies held by states and regions have increasingly become the subject of international rule-setting. This is particularly so in the field of trade, which has progressively targeted so-called “behind the border” regulatory barriers. In their reaction to this “deep trade” agenda, constituent units in different multilevel polities have shown widely varying degrees of openness to liberalizing their markets. Why is that? Trade Policy in Multilevel Government argues that domestic institutions and procedures of intergovernmental relations are the decisive factor. Countering a widely held belief among practitioners and analysts of trade policy that involving subcentral actors complicates trade negotiations, it demonstrates that the more voice a multilevel polity affords its constituent units in trade policy-making, the less the latter have an incentive eventually to exit from emerging trade deals. While in shared rule systems constituent unit governments are directly represented along the entirety of the policy cycle, in self-rule systems territorial representation is achieved merely indirectly. Shared rule systems are hence more effective than self-rule systems in organizing openness to trade. The book tests the explanatory power of this theory on the understudied case of international procurement liberalization in extensive studies of three systems of multilevel government: Canada, the European Union, and the United States.