Paradiplomats Against the State: Explaining Conflict in State and Substate Interest Representation in Brussels.

Literature on substate mobilization in Europe has provided some useful insights into the factors and mechanisms shaping territorial interest representation in Brussels. Although recent studies have enhanced our understanding of the determinants of cooperative and bypassing paradiplomacy, those underpinning conflict have remained rather obscure. Using a new data set with information on more than 100 substate offices in Brussels, this article sheds some light on the determinants of conflict between member state diplomacy and substate paradiplomacy. It argues that they are very different from those of bypassing and cooperation and that resource richness and diplomatic accreditation significantly affect its frequency. These findings not only are robust to multilevel modeling and nonparametric bootstrapping but also are of theoretical import as they highlight that devolution and party political incongruence fail to affect the frequency of conflict in Brussels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]