Mapping European Law

Kelemen, R. David and Pavone, Tommaso (2015) Mapping European Law. [Conference Proceedings] (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This article constitutes the first systematic effort to analyze the subnational practice of European Union (EU) law across time and space. We derive eight empirically falsifiable hypotheses about the spatio- temporal structure of EU litigation from the extant literatures on European legal integration and policy diffusion and assess their ability to explain temporal and spatial variation in the use of the preliminary reference procedure by Italian courts. We then provide a series of empirical assessments of these hypotheses. We begin with a description of the spread of preliminary references across Italy from 1957 through 2013. We then conduct a series of statistical analyses by pairing EU litigation data with subnational socioeconomic indicators to assess which variables best predict cross-regional variation in preliminary reference rates over the past two decades (1997-2012). Finally, we leverage GIS technology and elementary spatial statistics tools to more rigorously assess the spatial structure or clustering in the use of the preliminary reference procedure.

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