This paper inquires into whether the three types of arguments usually formulated in the normative literature on the legitimacy of secessioni.e. communitarian, choice, and remedial argumentsare articulated (or not) by separatist parties in Catalonia and Scotland. It concludes that these actors do use such arguments, but they tend to merge them in different combinations making a pluralist case for independence rather than developing monist reasoning as most political philosophers do. Furthermore, it finds a fourth type of argument which is under-theorised in the relevant literature. This is an instrumental argument whereby independence is depicted not as an end in itself, but as a means to achieve better welfare and governance for the national population. It further proposes a fourfold theoretical scheme that links communitarian and choice arguments to a principled logic based on the belief in the existence of an absolute right to self-determination and remedial and instrumental arguments to a consequentialist logic that legitimates secession on the condition that it serves the achievement of specific ends.

Recent scholarship on the populist radical right tends to imprecisely describe the welfare agenda of this party family with reference to its key ideological characteristics of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. We propose an alternative analytical framework that considers the multidimensionality of welfare state positions and the "deservingness criteria" that underlie ideas about welfare entitlement. Applying this framework to a sample of four European populist radical right parties, we conclude that three interrelated frames inform their welfare agenda. These parties, we argue, advocate social closure not only on the basis of the deservingness criterion of identity (welfare chauvinism), but also on criteria of control, attitude, and reciprocity (welfare producerism) and on an antagonism between the people and the establishment (welfare populism). Understanding the welfare agenda of the populist radical right requires us to move beyond welfare chauvinism and to reconsider the concept of welfare producerism and its interaction with welfare chauvinism. Zusammenfassung: J€ ungere Forschungbeitr€ age zur populistischen radikalen Rechten neigen dazu, die Wohlfahrtsagenda dieser Parteifamilie bez€ uglich ihrer Hauptmerkmale Nativismus, Autoritarismus und Populismus ungenau zu beschreiben. In diesem Artikel erarbeiten wir einen alternativen analytischen Rahmen, der die Vielschichtigkeit wohlfahrtsstaatlicher Positionen und die "Verdienstkriterien", die dem Anspruch auf Wohlfahrtsleistungen zugrunde liegen, ber€ ucksichtigt. Diesen Rahmen wenden wir auf vier populistische, rechtsradikale Parteien an und kommen zu dem Ergebnis, dass drei miteinander verbundene Kriterien ihre Wohlfahrtsagenden bestimmen. Diese Parteien bef€ urworten soziale Ausgrenzung nicht nur aufgrund von Identit€ at (Wohlfahrtschauvinismus), sondern auch von Kontrolle, Gesinnung und Gegenseitigkeit (Wohlfahrtsproduktivismus) sowie eines Gegensatzes zwischen Volk und Establishment (Wohlfahrtspopulismus). Um die Wohlfahrtsagenda der populistischen radikalen Rechten zu verstehen, m€ ussen wir daher € uber bestehende Konzeptionen von Wohlfahrtschauvinismus hinausgehen und das Konzept des Wohlfahrtsproduktivismus und seine Wechselwirkung mit Wohlfahrtschauvinismus neu € uberdenken. R esum e: Les etudes contemporaines de la droite populiste radicale analysent ses programmes en mati ere de politique sociale de mani ere impr ecise en s'appuyant sur les piliers id eologiques de cette *We would like to thank the editors of the Swiss Political Science Review for their support during the publication process and the anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments. Simon Bornschier commented on an earlier draft of this paper. We thank him a lot for his suggestions. Emmanuel Dalle Mulle would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for its generous support (grant n. P2GEP1-165085).

This paper argues that the Scottish National Party and the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie have recently made an instrumental case for independence that runs counter to traditional principled notions of external self-determination as an end in itself, as well as to remedial arguments based on claims of victimisation, alien rule and lack of recognition. They thus represent an important novelty in the history of nationalist discourse. More in detail, the peculiarity of their rhetoric lies in the use of functional arguments concerning the economic and social consequences of external self-determination in terms of competitiveness, well-being, the delivery of social services, good governance and better democracy, as well as in the acceptance of a gradualist approach to independence. The paper then presents an explanation for the adoption of these rhetorical strategies based on three sets of factors: normative, institutional and electoral.

Since the early 2000s, the Flemish nationalist party New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) has experienced a burgeoning growth. Paradoxically, for a stateless nationalist and regionalist party (SNRP), this performance has occurred without major changes in mass support for independence and only ambiguous ones for more regional autonomy, which suggests that the party appeals to different electoral subgroups through a vote-maximisation strategy of issue diversification. Providing an in-depth analysis of the multi-dimensional ideology of N-VA, this article contributes to the literature on SNRPs by arguing that N-VA has gone beyond issue diversification through a strategy of 'issue communitarisation' that consists not only in expanding its agenda beyond the centre-periphery cleavage, but rather in framing all other policy issues explicitly in (sub-state) nationalist terms. According to this strategy, all major conflicts on political power, social redistribution and cultural identity are systematically represented as being based on an unresolvable and overarching centre-periphery antagonism between Flanders and francophone Belgium.

This article introduces our themed section on The Left(s) and Nationalism(s), which provides a comparative analysis of the relationship between nationalism and different leftwing parties in Western Europe. It highlights the innovative comparative perspectives offered by this themed section, which not only concerns a series of different geographical cases studies but also involves the ideological plurality of the Left. The larger research question that our contributors address is how different left-wing parties have dealt with the inherent ideological tension between the universality claimed by the Left and the particularism inherent in nationalism, as a doctrine and a principle of political legitimacy. The article stresses three main contributions of our themed section: (1) Western European left-wing parties do engage with the themes of nationalism and nationhood, but they often rely on convenient silence to solve some of the contradictions with their progressive ideology. (2) None of these parties have formulated thick versions of the respective national identities. (3) State-wide left-wing parties have used instrumental conceptions of nationhood to address the challenge of separatist parties, but only with mixed results.