The more the merrier: accounting for sub-state paradiplomats in Brussels

Although talk of a “Europe of the regions” has come and gone, regions have come to Brussels but stayed. While such mobilization has not led to the emergence of a “third level”, regional officials in Brussels often outnumber their peers from their country’s permanent representation. Considering the sheer perseverance and size of such a presence, we explore what factors best account for the existence and staffing levels of such offices. To this end, a series of multi-level models using logistic and poisson link functions inform us about the determinants of both the existence and size of such offices. Controlling for a number of economic and demographic factors, we find that different dimensions of regional authority matter when accounting for regional presence in Brussels. These findings stress the importance of domestic institutional factors when analyzing the extent to which regions project themselves in Brussels.