‘Citizens of the region’: Party conceptions of regional citizenship and immigrant integration

Citizenship is usually regarded as the exclusive domain of the state. However, changes to the structure of states resulting from decentralisation and globalisation have required a re‐conceptualisation of citizenship, as authority is dispersed, identities multiply and political entitlements vary across territorial levels. Decentralisation has endowed regions with control over a wide range of areas relating to welfare entitlements, education and cultural integration that were once controlled by the state. This has created a new form of ‘regional citizenship’ based on rights, participation and membership at the regional level. The question of who does or does not belong to a region has become a highly politicised question. In particular, this article examines stateless nationalist and regionalist parties' (SNRPs) conceptions of citizenship and immigration. Given that citizenship marks a distinction between members and outsiders of a political community, immigration is a key tool for deciding who is allowed to become a citizen. Case study findings on Scotland, Quebec and Catalonia reveal that although SNRPs have advocated civic definitions of the region and welcome immigration as a tool to increase the regional population, some parties have also levied certain conditions on immigrants' full participation in the regional society and political life as a means to protect the minority culture of the region.     

Beyond issue diversification: N-VA and the communitarisation of political,economic and cultural conflicts in Belgium

Since the early 2000s, the Flemish nationalist party New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) has experienced a burgeoning growth. Paradoxically, for a stateless nationalist and regionalist party (SNRP), this performance has occurred without major changes in mass support for independence and only ambiguous ones for more regional autonomy, which suggests that the party appeals to different electoral subgroups through a vote-maximisation strategy of issue diversification. Providing an in-depth analysis of the multi-dimensional ideology of N-VA, this article contributes to the literature on SNRPs by arguing that N-VA has gone beyond issue diversification through a strategy of ‘issue communitarisation’ that consists not only in expanding its agenda beyond the centre–periphery cleavage, but rather in framing all other policy issues explicitly in (sub-state) nationalist terms. According to this strategy, all major conflicts on political power, social redistribution and cultural identity are systematically represented as being based on an unresolvable and overarching centre–periphery antagonism between Flanders and francophone Belgium.     

Quality of government and regional competition: A spatial analysis of subnational regions in the European Union

Building on previous work on competition networks and governmental performance among British local governments, this article investigates the diffusion of government quality across subnational regions of Europe through strategic interaction with neighbouring regions or competitor regions more generally. The article demonstrates the presence of spatial interdependence using standard spatial regression models and controlling for common explanations of quality of government. In particular for regions with high levels of autonomy from the national government, there is clear adjustment in government quality to be seen in response to disparities with competitor regions. The article further investigates the intensity of this geographical effect separately in the north and south of Europe in order to estimate the potential for virtuous or vicious cycles of good governance in the two regions, respectively. It is found that while regions in the north develop relatively independently of each other but respond to competitive pressure across Europe, in the south regions demonstrate a higher level of local interdependence, increasing the possibility of virtuous cycles – but also of vicious ones.     

Measuring portfolio salience in Eastern European parliamentary democracies

Abstract.  This article presents the results of an expert survey of 14 Eastern European countries on the subject of portfolio salience. Respondents provided ratings of the relative value of all ministerial portfolios in these countries over the years 1990–2002. The ratings are unique in the study of Eastern Europe and appear to possess the characteristics of comprehensiveness and reliability. Comparing the results with a similar survey of Western Europe indicates that individual portfolios are rated nearly identically in both regions. Some significant differences, however, emerge when we look separately at more advanced and less advanced Eastern European countries. Various suggestions are made for how scholars can use these new data in future work.     

Transition in Post-Communist States: Triple or Quadruple?

When the study of transitions moved from Latin America and southern Europe scholars initially assumed that transition in these two regions would be regime-based 'double transitions' of democratisation and marketisation. Gradually, it was accepted by scholars that many post-communist states inherited weak states and institutions, thereby adding a third factor to the transition process of stateness. This 'triple transition' has been largely accepted as sufficient to understand post-communist transitions and, in some cases, includes nationality questions. This article builds on the 'triple transition' by separating the national and stateness questions within its third aspect and argues that although both processes are interlinked they should be nevertheless separated into separate components (democratisation and marketisation are treated separately but are also closely related phenomena). This article argues two points. First, stateness and the nationality question were until recently ignored by scholars because these were not factors in earlier transitions. Secondly, they were ignored because the relationship of nationhood to the civic state is still under-theorised.     

Realism and Reform in Rousseau's Constitutional Projects for Poland and Corsica

Of all of the criticisms leveled against Rousseau's practical political writings few have been as pervasive as the charge of intentional utopianism. Over the years this charge has not gone entirely unanswered but, for the most part, the scholarly response has been to identify these works' realism solely in terms of Rousseau's desire to educate a corrupt Europe morally. In this essay, I reexamine the question of utopianism in Considérations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne and Projet pour la Corse to argue that the most egregiously fanciful or eccentric recommendations in these works actually demonstrate evidence of the philosopher's practicality and seriousness about constitutional reform in Poland and Corsica. To appreciate this realism though, readers must turn to Rousseau's opaque remarks about opinion's relationship to the laws in the Lettre à d'Alembert and other writings.     

Explaining variation in sub‐state regional identities in Western Europe

While national identities emerged as the dominant source of territorial identification during the twentieth century, sub‐state regional identities are becoming increasingly important in some Western European regions. However, this is not a uniform development. In some regions, nearly half of respondents in Eurobarometer surveys claim a stronger attachment to the region than to the state. In others, less than 4 per cent are primarily attached to their region. This article examines the extent to which these differences are explained by the characteristics of the regions themselves. What, if anything, do regions that mobilise public identity have in common? Developing a model of regional identities, the study examines cultural, geographic, economic and political factors that vary across different regions in Western Europe. The study finds that regional identities tend to be stronger in regions where a regional language is spoken and which do not border the state capital, signalling a cultural and a centre/periphery dimension to regional identity formation. However, there is potentially a more strategic aspect to identification, as regional identities are likely to be stronger in economically developed regions and in regions with highly distinctive voting behaviour.     

The past to come ∗

Proto-industrialization (PI) is a concept introduced several years ago to explain a number of paradoxical aspects of the pre-history of industrialization: in a word the remarkable growth of labour-intensive, low technology handwork for distant markets, dispersed in countless rural households throughout large regions of west, central and eastern Europe. Without disputing the facts themselves, the concept has been subjected to vigorous and serious criticism, including one by the present author. Geoff Eley's recent review article of one of the basic PI texts (KMS) argued that these critiques were basically negative, neglecting the ‘moment’ in which that work was conceived and written, and thus blind to the substantial advance which it represented. I dispute his argument; Eley neglects the constructive part of our own contributions — that is ‘our moments’: the attempts to formulate alternative frameworks capable of explaining the same facts and giving reason to our criticism. The Whole question surely brings into focus the more serious problem of the methodological and theoretical status of the several types of transition theory, most notably the problem of all ‘internalist’ treatments, the place of regions beyond Europe in an adequate debate on transition, and thus the question of the minimal framework suitable for dealing with such questions, even when they pertain directly to Europe.     

Regional Mobilization in the ‘New Europe’: A Research Agenda

This Special Issue re-assesses regional mobilization in the ‘New Europe’. We anticipate that enlargement to Central Europe, the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty and the largest economic and financial crisis since the birth of the European Community have affected how regional governments respond to Europeanization along three different dimensions: (1) the position they take vis-à-vis the process of EU integration more generally, (2) the strategies they adopt in response to Europeanization pressures and (3) their internal structures and dynamics of the EU member states as multi-level states. The article introduces a framework and formulates hypotheses to examine why and how Europeanization pressures in the ‘New Europe’ affect regional mobilization along these three dimensions. In the final section, the article also introduces the various contributions to this Special Issue and relates them to the analytical framework.     

Managing the Process of Decentralization: Transforming Old Public Entities into New Agencies in the Agricultural Sector

ABSTRACT

In an effort to reconfigure the system for the delivery of agricultural services, the Regional Government of Sardinia in Italy decided, in 2006, to suppress five public entities, and to establish three regional agencies in their place. Based on interviews conducted with managers and staff within these agencies, this article narrates the episode of implementing the organizational restructuring of this part of the regional government's agricultural policy. Drawing on this case, this article then presents an explanation of the process of carrying out organizational transformations (namely, mergers and demergers) within sub-national governments' administrative systems. The study finds that policy process features and context conditions figure prominently as explanatory factors for the path and outcome of the implementation of the organizational restructuring. On the whole, the research argument made in this article suggests some qualifications of existing generalizing arguments about the management of organizational transformations in the public sector.     

Failed expectations: Quality of government and support for populist parties in Europe

This article addresses an issue previously neglected in the research on support for populist parties: How do perceptions of the local quality of government (QoG) and local service delivery affect voters’ propensity to vote for a populist party? It argues that personal experience with poor QoG makes voters more likely to support populist parties. The argument highlights the interplay between supply and demand factors in explaining populist support and discusses why populist parties have been particularly successful in certain regions in Europe. A unique dataset from the Quality of Government Institute that surveys citizens’ perception of QoG in their area is used to estimate both individual‐ and regional‐level models of the link between perceived local QoG and populist support in Europe. The empirical results show a strong and robust association between within‐country variation in QoG and support for populist parties.     

The Externalities of Inequality: Fear of Crime and Preferences for Redistribution in Western Europe

Why is the difference in redistribution preferences between the rich and the poor high in some countries and low in others? In this article, we argue that it has a lot to do with the rich and very little to do with the poor. We contend that while there is a general relative income effect on redistribution preferences, the preferences of the rich are highly dependent on the macrolevel of inequality. The reason for this effect is not related to immediate tax and transfer considerations but to a negative externality of inequality: crime. We will show that the rich in more unequal regions in Western Europe are more supportive of redistribution than the rich in more equal regions because of their concern with crime. In making these distinctions between the poor and the rich, the arguments in this article challenge some influential approaches to the politics of inequality.     

Political Branding: Political Candidates Positioning Based on Inter-Object Associative Affinity Index

The article presents the conception of positioning politicians based on a three-stage approach to political branding. The main assumption is that a political brand—and politician's image as its crucial component—is conceptualized as consisting of a node in memory to which a variety of associations are linked. These associations—positive, negative, or neutral—must be shared with other rival candidates as well as with an prototypical ideal candidate, understood as a model and standard of comparison while developing detailed marketing strategies. One of the most valuable methods that has been used to measure these associations is associative overlap technique developed by Szalay. This measure is based on free verbal associations and it expresses the degree of similarity among objects (words, persons, groups) based on the number of similar responses (associations) they elicit in common. The first stage of branding, candidates’ positioning in various segments of voters, focuses on such affinity between politicians and is based on multidimensional scaling techniques. At the second stage, mutual relationships between particular elements (positive and negative, common and distinctive), of which a politician's image consists, are defined. The third level of political branding links the results of positioning to voters’ decisions. This framework of branding political candidates is presented on the basis of empirical research focused on Polish presidential candidates’ perception and evaluation in the 2005 presidential election. The results of the performed research show that it is not only the strengthening of politicians’ positive features but also neutralizing the negative ones that contributes to his higher expected quality.     

Separating Sense from Nonsense in the US Debate on the Financial Meltdown

The US debate on the causes of the financial meltdown and the policies appropriate for its resolution have a different center of gravity to that prevalent in Western Europe. Free-market solutions continue to be canvassed by conservative and libertarian politicians and political commentators with an intensity that is rarely found elsewhere, reflecting the extent to which a significant minority of American voters and policy makers remain wedded to a principled anti-statism. This article surveys those views, and the rebuttals to them now coming from more center-left elements of the US political class. It argues for the superiority of the latter, while noting that one serious adverse consequence of this positioning of the US debate is its capacity to distract attention from important underlying structural causes of the housing crisis and associated credit crunch.     

Historical Institutionalism and West European Politics

This article explores the selective affinities between the study of West European politics and historical institutionalism. We divide the last 30 years into four phases: the foundational ideas of the late 1970s and early 1980s; the evolution of these ideas from structuralism to institutionalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s; more radical revision under the turbulent 1990s and early 2000s; and the future outlook at the end of the first decade of the 2000s. We emphasise the ways in which the field of West European politics has shaped the direction of historical institutionalism as a distinctive approach to the study of politics, particularly historical institutionalism's focus on explaining actors' interests and behaviour. We also discuss recent debates within historical institutionalism concerning the role of history and path dependence, ideas, and institutional origins and change in the context of developments within West European politics. We conclude by discussing several challenges for both historical institutionalism and the study of West European politics: maintaining and improving analytical rigour as politics in Western Europe become even more fluid; continuing to build middle range theory; and extending our comparative analysis of Western Europe to include regions outside of Western Europe.     

Can Terrorism Abroad Influence Migration Attitudes at Home?

This article demonstrates that public opinion on migration “at home” is systematically driven by terrorism in other countries. Although there is little substantive evidence linking refugees or migrants to most recent terror attacks in Europe, news about terrorist attacks can trigger more negative views of immigrants. However, the spatial dynamics of this process are neglected in existing research. We argue that feelings of imminent danger and a more salient perception of migration threats do not stop at national borders. The empirical results based on spatial econometrics and data on all terrorist attacks in Europe for the post-9/11 period support these claims. The effect of terrorism on migration concern is strongly present within a country but also diffuses across states in Europe. This finding improves our understanding of public opinion on migration, as well as the spillover effects of terrorism, and it highlights crucial lessons for scholars interested in the security implications of population movements.     

Still blurry? Economic salience,position and voting for radical right parties in Western Europe

Do radical right parties present blurry economic stances, or have they clarified their positions while moving towards the economic left? This article questions the strategic behaviour of radical right parties in Western Europe. It shows that although radical right parties have increased their discussion of economic issues, and expert placements of this party family on the economic dimension have become more centrist over time, the uncertainty surrounding these placements continues to be higher for the radical right than any other party family in Europe. The article then moves on to examine to what extent voter-party congruence on redistribution, immigration and other issues of social lifestyle predict an individual's propensity to vote for the radical right compared to other parties. Although redistribution is the component of economic policy where the radical right seems to be centrist, the findings indicate that it remains party-voter congruence on immigration that drives support for radical right parties, while the congruence level for redistribution has an insignificant effect. The article concludes that while radical right parties seem to have included some clearly left-leaning economic proposals, which shifted the general expert views of these parties to the economic centre, their overall economic profiles remain as blurry as ever.     

The Making of a European Public Sphere: Media Discourse and Political Contention

Territorial autonomy is one aspect of power-sharing in multi-ethnic societies. Nevertheless, the multi-ethnic countries of Central and Eastern Europe are still among the most centralised in the European Union. This article analyses the failure of any attempts to establish (symmetric) federalism or (asymmetric) autonomy, creating self-governed regions by the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia. The analysis focuses on the positions of the main parties of the ethnic majorities and the Hungarian minority parties in the two countries. In both cases, the parties representing the Hungarian minorities have favoured territorial autonomy along ethnic lines, but this demand has been rejected by the parties of the ethnic majority. Against the historical legacy of unstable borders, the parties of the ethnic majority argue that territorial autonomy or federalisation might be a first step for a revisionist agenda and separatism. Instead, supported by the European integration, the parties have been able to agree on decentralisation as a half-hearted compromise.     

Political opportunity structures and right-wing extremist party success

West European right-wing extremist parties have received a great deal of attention over the past two decades due to their electoral success. What has received less coverage, however, is the fact that these parties have not enjoyed a consistent level of electoral support across Western Europe during this period. This article puts forward an explanation of the variation in the right-wing extremist party vote across Western Europe that incorporates a wider range of factors than have been considered previously. It begins by examining the impact of socio-demographic variables on the right-wing extremist party vote. Then, it turns its attention to a whole host of structural factors that may potentially affect the extreme right party vote, including institutional, party-system and conjunctural variables. The article concludes with an assessment of which variables have the most power in explaining the uneven electoral success of right-wing extremist parties across Western Europe. The findings go some way towards challenging the conventional wisdom as to how the advance of the parties of the extreme right may be halted.