Reducing the gap between leaders and voters? Elite polarization, outbidding competition, and the rise of secessionism in Catalonia

ABSTRACT

The ethnic outbidding thesis explains party polarization as a consequence of political changes amongst voters. We argued instead that party elites’ extreme position on the national identity cleavage can help polarizing strategies to prevail over moderate strategies in a context of increasing political uncertainty, without previous voters’ polarization. We test successfully this hypothesis in Catalonia by analysing the polarization of political parties and people’s demands for self-government in Catalonia since the early 2000s. We also find that the result of this outbidding pattern of competition was a reduction in the gap between elites’ and voters’ views on national identity. The analysis employs a set of unique data on party elites and activists’ national identity, from several surveys conducted on the delegates at party conferences of the main Catalan parties between 1996 and 2012. Our data provide empirical support for the argument that ethnic polarization is mainly an elite-driven process.

KEYWORDS:

• Political elites
• political parties
• nationalism
• decentralization
• secessionism
• Spain

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the reviewers and editors for their comments and suggestions, and also to our colleagues from the GREP research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We employ the term “ethnic parties” following the general pattern amongst the authors referenced in this paper. Chandra defines any ethnic party “as a party that is the champion of the particular interests of one ethnic category or set of categories” (Chandra 2011, 155).

2 Here party leaders are defined as those delegates with public offices (executive or parliamentary) and/or party offices at the regional or central level. Their proportion fluctuates from fifteen to twenty per cent to half of the respondents, which depends on the legal requirements to be a delegate in each party, but also on the particular bias in the collection of data.