How are processes of political development structured across space and time by preexisting institutions? This article develops a spatiotemporal theory of institutional change by analyzing the evolving infrastructural power of the European Union's legal order using geospatial methods. Specifically, the authors theorize that the pattern and pace of the domestic spread of EU law has been shaped by preexisting state institutions—particularly by the degree to which national judiciaries are hierarchically organized. To assess this claim, the article compares patterns of domestic judicial enforcement of EU law across France (a unitary state with a centralized judiciary), Italy (a weaker unitary state with a centralized judiciary), and Germany (a federal state with a decentralized judiciary). Developing a geospatial approach to the study of legal integration and historical institutionalism more broadly, the authors leverage an original geocoded data set of cases referred to the European Court of Justice by national courts to visualize how the subnational penetration of Europe's supranational legal order is conditioned by state institutions.

中文翻译：

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法律整合的政治地理学

先前存在的制度如何跨时空构建政治发展过程？本文通过使用地理空间方法分析欧盟法律秩序不断演变的基础设施力量，发展了制度变迁的时空理论。具体而言，作者推测，欧盟法律在国内传播的模式和速度是由先前存在的国家机构塑造的——特别是由国家司法机构的等级组织程度决定。为了评估这一说法，本文比较了法国（一个拥有集中司法机构的单一国家）、意大利（一个拥有集中司法机构的较弱的单一国家）和德国（一个拥有分散司法机构的联邦国家）的国内司法执行模式）。