Regionalization with Europeanization? The rescaling of interest groups in multi-level systems

The European integration literature reveals differentiated patterns of Europeanization. Meanwhile, the territorial politics literature has highlighted the emergence of ‘regions with regionalism’ due to ongoing decentralization reforms. If decentralization encourages the spatial rescaling of policy communities, does it also affect the Europeanization of a region’s interest groups? To answer this question, we analyse 18 regional interest groups in three regions in Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. We find some evidence that interest groups operating in the context of more highly decentralized regions will Europeanize to a greater extent than those which do not. We call this ‘slipstream Europeanization’ as it is driven by functional and mimetic logics caused by (1) the regional government’s own Europeanization, and (2) its knock-on effect on domestic mediating factors. The results are comparable across different dimensions of Europeanization and different group-types. Overall, this exploratory study illustrates how regionalization and Europeanization processes interact at different territorial scales.