ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the European Commission, and partly the European Parliament, to equate subnational authorities to private lobbyists in the European Union (EU) Transparency Register. Therefore, in terms of “Better Regulation”, it could have been more reasonable to propose, for instance, amending this international regime rather than creating a new regulatory layer at the EU level. Perhaps one of the best practical examples of a multilevel coalition being successfully assembled, in the pre-legislative stage, specifically to argue against an incoming EU policy on grounds of subsidiarity, came into being after the Commission attempted to legislate on urban mobility. Thus, it can be argued that the praxis of subsidiarity scrutiny is more heavily reliant on political and practical factors than on the relative merit of the subject matter itself. By contrast there are many other examples, such as the proposal for standardisation of public documents, even if the subject matter was directly concerned by subsidiarity.
