The change in Italy's main regional policy (for the south) in the course of the 1990s provides a prima facie case of Europeanization tout court for scholars of Europeanization. A new policy was adopted that was evidently inspired by the European regional policy launched in 1988. However, examining Europeanization only from a top-down perspective (in terms of policy outcome) provides a limited insight into the process. A bottom-up approach that evaluates the impact of Europeanization through a temporal dimension of change, integrating the Europeanized and domestic effects, allows a more precise assessment of the degree to which Europeanization may have caused or reinforced a process of change in Italian southern policy.

The article will suggest a bottom‐up approach to analyzing the impact of European Union (EU) conditionality on candidate countries. If requiring comprehensive reforms, EU accession negotiations offer domestic actors a legitimacy standard, external constraints and a focal point for electoral coalitions as resources in the domestic political arena. The Turkish case serves as a hypothesis‐generating case study suggesting that domestic actors who are disadvantaged in domestic resources in these dimensions embrace EU accession, whereas domestic actors who feel threatened in their domestic resources adopt an opposite strategy. It will be demonstrated that the two major Turkish political parties adopted a cost–benefit calculus in their position towards EU accession. The Turkish case is particularly intriguing because the positions adopted by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Republican People's Party (CHP), respectively, have been counter‐intuitive, and in fact both parties have drastically reversed earlier positions towards EU accession and done so in disregard of the preferences of their core electorate.

This article explores an aspect of Europeanisation which notions of 'adaptive pressure' and 'usage' of European policies have tended to neglect: in a complex policy field such as regional policy it is the evolving nature and heterogeneity of (different) domestic institutional arrangements which will shape and determine the opportunities for domestic actors to exploit European policies. The article explains the differential impact of European regional policies in eastern Germany and southern Italy by focusing on the different domestic institutional settings and the competition between domestic actors for the position of gatekeeper in relation to the Commission. Despite similar exposure to European regional policies, the existence of 'parallel institutions' in German regional policy proved to be the basis for an empowerment of the regions through the reinforcement of one institutional arrangement at the expense of the other while limiting change within the institutions. By contrast, the dichotomous nature of formal and informal rules and institutions in Italian policies for the south resulted in the exploitation of European regional policy by a national actor in order to drive through change in governance and administration.

Social cues, such as eye gaze and pointing fingers, can increase the prioritisation of specific locations for cognitive processing. A previous study using a manual reaching task showed that, although both gaze and pointing cues altered target prioritisation (reaction times [RTs]), only pointing cues affected action execution (trajectory deviations). These differential effects of gaze and pointing cues on action execution could be because the gaze cue was conveyed through a disembodied head; hence, the model lacked the potential for a body part (i.e., hands) to interact with the target. In the present study, the image of a male gaze model, whose gaze direction coincided with two potential target locations, was centrally presented. The model either had his arms and hands extended underneath the potential target locations, indicating the potential to act on the targets (Experiment 1), or had his arms crossed in front of his chest, indicating the absence of potential to act (Experiment 2). Participants reached to a target that followed a nonpredictive gaze cue at one of three stimulus onset asynchronies. RTs and reach trajectories of the movements to cued and uncued targets were analysed. RTs showed a facilitation effect for both experiments, whereas trajectory analysis revealed facilitatory and inhibitory effects, but only in Experiment 1 when the model could potentially act on the targets. The results of this study suggested that when the gaze model had the potential to interact with the cued target location, the model's gaze affected not only target prioritisation but also movement execution.

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