The authors attempt to sort out three exogenous factors affecting the domes
tic societies of European Union (EU) member countries: market globalization
, the European single market, and European supranational institutions. They
offer a research design to separate the respective manifestations of each
factor and apply it to four domestic dimensions: labor market, capital mark
et, electoral competition, and center-local government relations. Although
they find systematic evidence in the cases of the labor and capital markets
supporting the widely shared claim that the EU is an agent of globalizatio
n, the results also point to the importance of the voluntarist component in
the electoral and subgovemmental domains.