Depuis le Conseil européen de Lisbonne en 2000, l’Union européenne s’active à devenir une société de la connaissance leader dans l’hypercompétition mondiale. Elle s’attache à enrichir et structurer ses ressources de diversité et de créativité en restructurant sa méthode d’intégration suivant une approche plus ascendante. Elle pousse aussi au décloisonnement de tous les secteurs socio-économiques afin d’en libérer les potentiels d’innovation. Une société en réseau se tisse ainsi grâce au développement des acteurs locaux et d’une connivence public-privé. Toutefois, ces mutations juridiques exigent l’adhésion active des citoyens. Dès lors, à côté des politiques d’éducation, de recherche et d’innovation, l’Union favorise les synergies avec les domaines de l’emploi, de la jeunesse et de la culture. Tous ces changements entraînent une quête effrénée de cohérence globale nécessaire à la compétitivité et à la durabilité du modèle européen de société de la connaissance. Pour atteindre ces objectifs, le droit européen va puiser sa cohérence dans l’articulation des concepts d’Etat social actif, de méritocratie et de démocratisation. / Since the European Council of Lisbon in 2000, the European Union tends to become a knowledge society leader in the world competition. It enriches and structures its ressources of diversity and creativity by generating a renewal of its integration method around a bottom-up approach. It stimulates too a decompartmentalization of all the socio-economic sectors to free all the innovation potentials. So, a network society appears thanks to the development of regional actors and a public-private connivance. But, the legal evolutions need to get the adhesion of the citizens. That’s why, in addition to the policies of education, research and innovation, the European Union fosters synergies with the domains of employment, youth and culture. All these transitions trigger a search of global coherence to guarantee the competitiveness and the sustainability of the European model of knowledge society. To reach these goals, the European law finds its coherence by articulating the notions of active welfare State, meritocracy and democratization.

This thesis addresses the question as to why multilevel politics is becoming an integral part of politics in Europe. Multilevel politics is conceptualized as a system which functions through a complex web of political relations within and across levels of decision making. The thesis argues that the rise of multilevel politics can be explained by its institutionalization in terms of the emergence, the evolution and especially the effects of relevant institutions. Based on a mixed-method research project, the influence of European institutions on subnational actors and the alignment of actor motives with institutional characteristics are empirically shown. The first chapter of the dissertation establishes the centrality of institutions for political transformation, examines the role of transnational and domestic institutions for multilevel politics, and contextualizes the research question in terms of institution-actor relations. The second chapter develops a new-institutionalist theoretical framework that explains the emergence, the evolution and the effects of the institutions, and formulates a series of hypotheses with regard to freestanding institutional influence, power distribution, material benefits and political identification. The third chapter outlines the mixed-method research design which addresses individual-level and institutional-level variations through a Europe-wide survey and a comparative case study. The fourth chapter on survey results shows generally favourable views on multilevel politics, and strong associations of these views with the independent variables under scrutiny. The fifth chapter specifies a multivariate model which includes all posited variables and confirms the majority of the hypotheses. Therefore, the new-institutionalist argument is broadly confirmed, while there is relatively weak evidence to sustain sociological explanations. The final chapter compares the Committee of the Regions and the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, and examines the institutional characteristics which correspond to the hypothesized variables. It is then concluded that the two institutions share several overarching similarities, and display complementarity in other aspects.