The Party Politics of Territorial Reforms in Europe

Abstract

This article develops a comprehensive and dynamic framework for analysing the party politics of territorial reforms in Europe (and beyond). The main focus is on explaining the strategy of political parties on the issue of territorial reform, by which is meant the position taken on, and the salience given to, the issue of how to allocate powers and resources across levels of government. The premise is that political parties can follow an electoral, ideological and territorial logic of action when deciding their strategy. The article distinguishes between the main drivers and argues that the choice of logic by political parties will be determined by the relative weight of strategic incentives, on the one hand, and ideological and organisational constraints, on the other. The framework also highlights the importance of contextual effects such as the polity’s institutional arrangements and the influence of time in the process of territorial restructuring, evident in the different moments of territorial reforms and the occurrence of feedback effects between them.

Acknowledgements

This special issue is the result of a workshop held under the auspices of the Institute of Governance, University of Edinburgh in November 2010. We thank Charlie Jeffery and the Territorial Politics Working Group in assisting us with its organisation. Funding for the workshop and the production of this volume was provided by the ESRC (PTA-026-27-2270; PTA-026-27-2119) and by the Brussels Regional Government (ISRIB BB2B2010-2-23). We thank all the workshop participants and the colleagues who acted as discussants: Charlie Jeffery, Arjan Schakel, Wilfried Swenden, Elodie Fabre and Michael Keating.

Notes

1 . The 40 states include the 27 members of the European Union, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, the six states of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia), Albania and the three European countries of the former USSR (Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova).

2 . Moreover, notable exceptions to this critique have taken the form of case studies for select countries of Western Europe, rather than a European comparative. (For Belgium see Deschouwer 1999; Swenden and Jans 2007; for Germany see Jeffery 1999; for Italy see Cento Bull 2002; Keating and Wilson 2010; for Spain see Colino 2009; Keating and Wilson 2009; Orte and Wilson 2009; for UK see Jeffery 2009; Mitchell 1990, 1998.)

3 . This set of factors are: the nature, scope and (a) symmetric format of a state’s federal arrangements; the territorial distinctiveness of voting behaviour and of party systems; the party’s ideological beliefs and organisational origins; the party’s place in government or opposition at the regional and federal levels.

4 . State-wide parties represent one of the mainstream ideologies of the state (e.g. communism, social democracy, ecology, liberalism, Christian democracy, conservatism) and seek to obtain polity-wide support in regional and state-level elections (Hopkin and van Houten 2009; Swenden and Maddens 2009). Regionalist parties, also defined as ethno-regionalist parties (De Winter and Tursan 1998), stateless nationalist and regionalist parties (Sartori 1976) or non-state-wide parties (Pallares et al. 1997) are parties that have a limited territorial reach (confined to one or more regions) and that aim to represent a specific territorial group or nation.

5 . These interactions will adopt a ‘multi-level’ character – i.e. feature an interaction between the state-wide and regional party systems – in function of the maturity of regional political institutions and the differences between regional and state-level elections in terms of electoral behaviour, party system format and mechanics, policy dimensionality and issue salience, and vertical incongruence of government.

6 . In political theory, ideology has been defined as a coherent system of cognitive and normative beliefs that guides political action, by furnishing images of the utopias to which social groups aspire, by assigning meaning to different political concepts and by establishing a clear hierarchy between them (Freeden 1998)

7 . It should be underlined that there is no automatic relationship between the appeal of a specific logic of action and the adoption of a position and strategy on the territorial dimension, since each type of logic could push a party towards a position of change or no change in the direction of either centralisation or decentralisation.

8 . This ambition can take a variety of forms: while in Central and Eastern Europe, minority nationalist parties have been concerned primarily with language rights and have only recently begun to advocate territorial autonomy, regionalist parties in contemporary Western Europe have effected a shift ‘from language to money’ and moved from identity-based to functional issues pertaining to the autonomy and capacity of their nation/region.

9 . This variation in left–right positioning is attributable to the complex relationship between class, nationhood and territory shaped by the productive structures and class composition of regions, and by the incentives and constraints of party competition (Keating 1992; Van Houten 2003; Erk 2005).

10 . The adoption of a territorial logic here is not automatically associated with a position that is favourable or contrary to decentralisation; it simply means that parties consider how an existing set of endowments and resources, and proposed reforms, will affect the future welfare of territorial constituents

11 . Chapter 21 of the acquis communautaire covers regional policy, and sets out the criteria for putting together, financing and implementing EU-funded regional policy programmes.

12 . The electoral system exercises ambiguous effects. In systems with proportional representation (PR), the low electoral threshold makes it easy for regionalist parties to dispossess state-wide of their seats. In contrast, under a plurality electoral system, the high threshold reduces the significance of their electoral threat. However, plurality systems also amplify the size of electoral swings and exaggerate a party’s dependence on seats from a particular territory, meaning that a high degree of volatility volatility (especially in marginal constituencies) could lead to a loss of seats and office. Thus, the vulnerability of state-wide parties in plurality systems will be more sensitive to the overall electoral flux and to their geographical distribution of their electoral support.

13 . Power relations between central and regional branches in multi-level systems will be affected by the pattern of incumbency. Although it may not have an immediate effect o, formal structures, this variable will affect the propensity of the central branch to intervene in regional matters and the decision of a regional branch to make use of its autonomy. We can expect that a party will be more centralised if the central branch is in office, and the regional branch is either in office or opposition, and that a party will be more decentralised if the regional branch is in office, and the central branch in opposition (Swenden 2006; Swenden and Maddens 2009).

14 . The contrast between presidential and parliamentary regimes does not feature as an important dimension of analysis in the cases included in this special issue, but could constitute an important variable in other settings.

15 . This is especially the case if regional and central branches are both in government. In the case of vertical government incongruence, we can expect regional branches to espouse a more clearly electoral and territorial logic and to defend the interests of their region in opposing their rivals in the federal government.

16 . In unitary states it is determined by central government legislation through simple majorities; in federal states it is guaranteed in the constitution and involves a demanding amendment process; in hybrid political systems the existence of regional government is enshrined in the constitution, while their specific powers are established by ordinary or quasi-constitutional legislation.

17 . It is important to underline that greater autonomy in matters of taxation does not necessarily entail greater resources: for poorer regions with a narrower tax base, an increase in fiscal autonomy and a decrease in the volume of central transfers could engender a reduction in capacity. Thus, the capacity of regions to realise their political goals does not necessarily depend on their independence from the centre.

18 . Citizens build a degree of identification with regional governments and re-arrange their political loyalties and voting behaviour accordingly; the new regional political elite endorses existing territorial arrangements, become significant actors within the state-wide party organisation and socialised into the regional political culture.

19 . Examples from the area of territorial finance are: the abrogation of the principle of inter-territorial solidarity in favour of the principle of governmental accountability, the adjustment in the base and rate of ‘own’ taxes, in the portion of shared taxes transferred to regions, or in the criteria used to calculate central transfers.