Regionalizing Patronage? Federal Resource Allocation and Party Politics in Spain

Abstract

Does federalism enhance patronage practices? To the degree that subnational governments are responsible for significant portions of total public spending in politically decentralized systems, the study of the institutional facilitators of patronage can be fruitfully advanced by mapping out the territorial distribution of political and economic resources. Using data from intergovernmental transfers in Spain—an often-cited case of patronage-driven electoral mobilization—we find that, unexpectedly, Spanish regions that have a regional-party dominant system do not necessarily ‘over-fish’ patronage resources. This apparent inconsistency is explained by the fact regionalist parties are more likely to flourish in economically advantaged regions, which are normally more interested in deepening fiscal co-responsibility (which makes the reliance on patronage and pork-barrelling less likely).

Keywords:

• Spain
• federalism
• decentralization
• regionalist parties
• patronage

Notes

Paradoxically, Spain is not a federation in name. Among the reasons accounting for the reluctance to explicitly include the notion of federalism in the drafting of the post-Franco 1978 Constitution is the apprehension of the Union of the Democratic Center (UDC—Unión de Centro Democrático)—namely the party that steered the democratic transition—to encourage radical nationalism in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Federalism is a highly controversial concept in the Spanish public discourse because it brings to mind some of the conflicts that triggered the Civil War in the 1930s.

Known as Fuero (i.e. forum) AC, the Basque Country and Navarra were set apart from all other regions in that they could collect most taxes in exchange for payment of an annual percentage (the cupo) to the national government. This system of finance allows these AC to restore some aspects of their historical charters.

This level of expenditure decentralization is much higher than that found in federal countries with similar economic and political structures, such as Belgium (about 12%), matching Austria, and slightly below Germany and the United States (Watts, 1999: 47).

Spain's inter-regional demographic disparities do not deviate from those in EU countries of comparable size (Castells, 2001).

Divided government has been the subject of much research. One of the methodological difficulties is that divided government is a legislature-level variable, which means that we have very few observations in the post-democratization era in Spain, mostly at the regional level. In this vein, the problem is that statistical models will generate estimates for areas of the data that are sparsely populated or empty altogether. Our coding scheme of the divided government variable, albeit incomplete in so far as it does not cover all the theoretically plausible scenarios, seeks to tap the above-mentioned methodological constraint by offering a parsimonious classification. I credit an anonymous reviewer for helping me clarify my thoughts on this issue.

Some scholars claim that regionalist parties in Spain should be classified as non-state-wide parties because these parties circumscribe their activities over a territory smaller than the national territory (Pallarés and Keating, 2003). Others prefer the most general notion of nationalist parties (Hernandez Bravo, 1989). Elsewhere, I argue that these parties should be identified as ethnoregionalist parties because their demands for regional-level policy-making authority stem from, and are articulated through, ethnic and identity factors (Gordin, 2001).

Flying in the face of the highly influential freezing (i.e. stabilization) thesis about electoral realignments in Western Europe of Stein Rokkan, the ruling UCD “suffered perhaps from the most important electoral defeat ever experienced by a political force in Western Europe; indeed, its vote share decreased from 35 to 7 percent and its representation in Congress went from 168 seats to a mere dozen” (Gunther et al., in Montabes, 1994: 15). Hopkin (1999) provided a very vivid account of the meteoric rise and fall of the UCD in the 1980s.

An additional effect of the territorialization of politics in Spain after the death of Franco has been that the strong presence of regionalist parties has blocked the emergence of other contenders in the party system. For instance, green parties and right-wing neopopulist parties, increasingly popular in other West European nations, are insignificant in the Spanish party system.

To corroborate whether these results hold when the number of observation is increased, we simulated an increase in n site by using the ‘weight cases’ function in the SPSS software. This n increase is weighted by the ratio between the number of AC in Spain and the number of states in the United States. The latter case is a decentralized polity as well, but given its relatively high number of subnational units it provides a realistic yardstick to ‘artificially’ expand the number of observations. The sign and significance of variables remained unchanged after this simulation.

I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for reminding me of this point.

Gibbons (1999: 26) claimed that

in terms of their broad strategies, regional and nationalist parties have tended, to some extent, to copy each other. This was illustrated during the Second Republic as, one after another, the historic nationalities sought autonomous status … ‘autonomous fever’ spread across the land-mass of Spain in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when regional consciousness even surfaced in areas of Spain such as Extremadura and Murcia, not known previously to have had any special claims to regional separateness.