In many Western European states, an increasing number of autonomist parties are taking part in government at state and regional levels. To date, however, scholars have paid little attention to the repercussions of government incumbency for these actors. This article aims to take a first step towards redressing this oversight. Based on an extensive literature examining political parties in government, we formulate hypotheses about how autonomist parties will approach, behave within and be affected by government office. We test these hypotheses by examining the participation of autonomist parties in regional and state governments in Western Europe since 1945. The findings demonstrate that the difficult decisions autonomist parties must make when entering government, the subsequent dilemmas and challenges that must be resolved once the threshold of government has been crossed, and the consequences of government incumbency, are similar to those faced by any political party in government. However, the fact that autonomist parties operate within a multi-level political context can render these challenges more complex than is the case for political parties operating (mainly or exclusively) at a single territorial level, usually that of the state. The article concludes by identifying key factors that affect the success of autonomist parties in government.
This paper ponders the question of whether Members of Parliaments' (MPs) previous experiences and personal attributes may have any impact on the way they behave once elected. In agreement with a recent stream of literature, the authors hypothesise that MPs with strong territorial roots might behave as agents of the local community, promoting its interests and demands in their parliamentary activity. The assertion that individual biographies influence legislative activity in parliamentary democracies runs counter to the commonly held view that in this kind of institutional setting, legislative assemblies are dominated by parties, leaving little room for individually oriented behaviour and little incentive to do anything that is not coordinated by party organisations. The article builds an original 'index of localness', the main independent variable, based on the place of birth and previous political experience at local level of MPs. Then, taking into account territorially targeted Private Members' Bills as a proxy for the territorial behaviour of each legislator, the hypothesis is tested by looking at both aggregate evidence and individual-level data. Aggregate data support the hypothesis, as they show a monotonically increasing relationship between the two variables: the more a legislator is linked to his/her territory, the more (on average) he/she will sponsor bills concerning the local area. Individual-level data confirm this finding, as the correlation between the two variables also holds when entering a number of control variables.
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