Although subnational empowerment is thought to be of crucial significance for the understanding of European integration, political science struggles to explain differential subnational mobilization i.e. the distinct engagement of subnational governmental actors with the institutions and processes of EU policy-making. Standard explanations in this area focus on macro-level variables. From a theoretical perspective such explanations remain incomplete as long as they are not complemented by an actor-centred component. It thus comes as no surprise that available theories of subnational mobilisation fail to account for crucial empirical puzzles. In particular they cannot explain why institutional alike subnational entities follow different policies as regards, for example, the constitutional development of the EU or why they implement EU policies differently. To overcome such explanatory deficits the research project suggests exploring the potential of elite preferences as the missing link in the causal chain from macro-level variables towards a comprehensive theory of subnational mobilisation.
