Attention please! Explaining local governments’ political attention for Europe

Abstract

As a result of the ongoing European integration process, the EU increasingly impacts local governments. However, how they respond to this differs: local governments ‘Europeanise’ in different ways. There is much debate in the literature about which factors explain this difference in Europeanisation. The receipt of EU funds, population size, location and the attitude of the municipal government are often mentioned, but their exact impact and underlying mechanisms are subject of much debate. The impact of the aforementioned variables is tested in this study for different dimensions of Europeanisation, based on an analysis of almost all coalition agreements of Dutch municipalities, collected over three periods. In total 1076 agreements were analysed using a multinomial logistic regression, showing that the municipal size and previous attention to Europe are important factors for different dimensions of Europeanisation.