Regionalist Challenges to European States: A Quantitative Assessment

Abstract

Regional autonomy demands are widespread in Western Europe and are often seen as a significant challenge to the authority of the European 'nation states'. This article formulates and tests possible explanations for variation in such demands in six Western European countries. As suggested by the existing literature, several cultural and economic characteristics of regions are associated with autonomy demands. To account for further variation and differences in specific demands, however, it is necessary to focus on the nature of party competition in a region. Autonomy demands will be strong if several regionally organized parties compete against each other and more restrained if regional and national parties are in competition. This suggests that regionalism is generally less consequential for existing state structures than often presumed. It seriously challenges state structures only under certain political conditions.

Introduction: Re-conceptualizing Sub-state Mobilization

“…Political actors advocating sub-state territorial demands have, for example, been described as ethnic parties (Horowitz, 1985;Lane et al, 1991), peripheral movements (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967;Rokkan and Urwin, 1983), nationalist (Coakley, 1992;Conversi, 1997;Aguilera de Prat, 2002), ethnonationalist (Connor, 1977), ethnoterritorial (Rudolph and Thompson, 1985), minority nationalist (Lynch, 1996;Elias, 2008a), stateless nationalist (Keating, 1996;Guibernau, 1999), regional nationalist (Van Atta, 2003), autonomist (Seiler, 1982;De Winter et al, 2006), regionalist (Brancati, 2007;Jolly, 2007;Van Houten, 2007;Dandoy and Sandri, 2007;Hepburn, 2009a), or non-state-wide parties (De Winter, 1994;Pallares et al, 1997). Often, scholars use these labels interchangeably in their writings (even within the same essay).…”

Ethnic outbidding and nested competition: Explaining the extremism of ethnonational minority parties in Europe

“…Due to the former feature, ethno‐regionalist parties fall within the scope of predictions of theories of ethnic party competition. For analyses of the platforms of regionalist parties that are beyond the scope of theories of ethnic party competition and therefore this article, see Massetti and Schakel (, ), Sorens () and Van Houten ().…”

Regional resources and democratic secessionism

“…Regarding the effect of differences in wealth levels, the political science literature has shown a correlation between the relative wealth of a region and separatist tendencies in democracies (Van Houten, 2007). One important reason is that wealthier regions are often the net-contributors in a union subsidizing other regions.…”