Sub‐national authorities in the EU’s post‐socialist states: joining the multi‐level polity?

ENThis paper gauges the extent to which sub-national authorities (SNAs) from the EU’s post-socialist member states are attempting to affect EU policy making and considers whether their efforts heretofore have proven successful. The paper finds (a) that SNAs are engaging four of the five ‘channels of representation’, (b) that significant cross-national and intra-country variation characterizes emerging patterns of mobilization, and (c) that territorial balances of power in post-socialist states remain heavily tipped in the favour of central states. SNAs from central and eastern Europe are rapidly integrating into the EU’s multi-level polity, but the pre-eminence of central state authority in the region is not fundamentally threatened.