The Regional Battleground: Partisanship as a Key Driver of the Subnational Contestation of Citizenship

ABSTRACT

This article challenges the idea that territorial rescaling invariably leads to a race to the bottom in the provision of rights for vulnerable subjects. Instead, the comparison of two regions in Italy and two cantons in Switzerland shows that subnational governments make different choices reflecting the preferences of their voters. While focusing on the case of undocumented immigrants and their inclusion/exclusion from health care, the article explains how subnational governments have appropriated certain categories of rights that constituted the hallmark of national citizenship for most of the twentieth century.

Acknowledgments

If there is any virtue to this article, the credit goes to Jean-Thomas Arrighi and Rainer Bauböck who commented extensively on it. I am also grateful to Camilla Alberti, Denise Efionayi-Mäder, Annique Lombard, Sean Mueller, Sarah Spencer, Dejan Stjepanovic and Verena Wisthaler, for their useful suggestions and feedback for improving the main argument.

ORCID

Lorenzo Piccoli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4032-4793

Notes

1 Today, national health services have been established in several European countries, including Italy, Spain, and the UK; and in countries with health insurance systems, such as Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, coverage was progressively extended to become nearly universal. Public health care is still treated as residual and relies on strongly privatised provision in places like the US and Brazil.

2 Article 12 reads: ‘Persons in need and unable to provide for themselves have the right to assistance and care, and to the financial means required for a decent standard of living’. Furthermore, Article 41b requires the federal government and the cantons to ensure that everyone has access to the health care that they need: ‘The Confederation and the Cantons shall, as a complement to personal responsibility and private initiative, endeavour to ensure that … every person has access to the health care that they require’.

3 Article 32 states that the Republic protects health as a fundamental right of the individual and a collective interest. The Article reads as follows:

The Republic safeguards health as a fundamental right of the individual and as a collective interest and guarantees free medical care to the indigent. No one may be obliged to undergo any health treatment except under the provisions of the law. The law may not under any circumstances violate the limits imposed by respect for the human person.

4 In Switzerland, the cantonal parliaments of Vaud (Grand Conseil) and Zürich (Kantonsrat) are elected every four years, together with the cantonal collegial executives of seven persons, which are also directly elected in a popular vote. In Italy, the regional assemblies (consigli regionali) of the regions of Lombardy and Tuscany are elected every five years and, since 1999, so are also the regional presidents.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) on the move funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.