Decentralisation and Europeanization processes have increased the multi-levelness of European polities hence generating a number of challenges that politicians and bureaucracies have to face. This panel explores some of these challenges in terms of 1) political party adaptation and the survival of politicians in such environments and 2) in terms of regional administration evolution and mobilisation faced with a changing state and an integrating supranational community. The first three contributions explore the multi-levelness of party politics. Berg proposes the intriguing case of Sweden where European, national, regional and local elections will be held within four months, hence emphasising questions related to party strategies and coordination when multi-level electoral arenas become temporally aligned. Klingelhöfer et al delve deeper into one of the questions underlined by Berg: that of the vertical coordination of parties competing within different territorially-defined electoral arenas. They seek to uncover whether voters perceive inconsistencies between the national party and its regional branches and whether this can have electoral consequences. Such consequences may, of course, be dire for elected politicians which is what Coller et al propose to study through the Spanish case. The last two papers switch our attention away from parties and parliamentarians towards regional authorities and bureaucracies. These are also embedded in multi-level systems. To this end, Bauer/Tatham explore how regional bureaucrats view economic governance and European governance in a crisis-hit Europe while Beyers et al seek to uncover the extent to which EU public consultations reveal a tension between the expression of functional and territorial.