Paper Titles & Abstracts

Regions are affected by a broad range of European Union policies. Nevertheless their voices are seldom heard when positions are drawn up at the national level. Therefore it is not surprising that regions have engaged in additional strategies to influence decisions made at the EU-level. The obvious question then is under what conditions regions can be influential in EU legislative processes. The latter is the main research question of my PhD project. Since a decade scholars have inductively explored the influence of regions in the EU, mostly using multi-level governance as a diving board to venture into this field. I intend to complement this approach by combining both the territorial politics and interest groups literature. This paper will therefor first of all verify whether the conclusions from the literature on interest groups in the EU apply to regions and regional representations. Secondly, the existing literature is largely confined to either single case-studies or to quantitative analyses using a rather vague and broad conception of influence. I intend to add to this an analysis on the level of legislative issues. This paper will present an issue based research design to measure the impact of regions on EU legislation.