Abstract: The paper aims at exploring the impact of regional policies on territorial restructuring in Western Europe since the 1970s. It challenges the common assumption that the political context across Europe has provided incentives to regional governments for the sole purpose of differentiating their policies to meet different needs and preferences. It opens with a presentation of two other incentives downplayed in the existing literature, namely the incentive to use policy making to impact intergovernmental arrangements and the incentive to develop social and education policies. The paper contends that legitimacy-seeking dynamics stand behind regional governments’ receptiveness to various incentives. It hypothesizes that regional policy-making is partly path-dependant on previous legitimating principles. Thus the paper provides a strong explanation for the outcome of regional policy-making in many empirical cases: namely the production of nationally differentiated sets of regional policies. The hypothesis is confirmed in two contrasting institutional contexts, Germany and France.
