Decentralisation Reforms and Regionalist Parties’ Strength: Accommodation, Empowerment or Both?
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321716644612 |
| Author | Arjan H Schakel,Emanuele Massetti |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321716644612
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(2) 432 –451
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321716644612
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Decentralisation Reforms
and Regionalist Parties’
Strength: Accommodation,
Empowerment or Both?
Emanuele Massetti1 and Arjan H Schakel2
Abstract
The article aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact of decentralisation on
regionalist parties’ strength in both national and regional elections. We consider decentralisation
both as a putatively crucial event, that is, the creation of an elected regional government, and as a
process. Our study is based on a dataset including aggregate vote shares for 227 regionalist parties
competing in 329 regions across 18 Western democracies. Our findings show that decentralisation
as an event has a strong impact on the number of regionalist parties, as it triggers processes of
proliferation and diffusion. Decentralisation as a process has an overall empowerment effect in
regional elections, while it does not have an effect in national elections. However, our analysis
also reveals that the overall null effect in national elections is actually the result of an empowering
effect on new regionalist parties and of an accommodating effect on old regionalist parties.
Keywords
territorial politics, centre-periphery cleavage, decentralisation reforms, regionalist parties
Accepted: 22 February 2016
The holding of a referendum on Scotland’s independence from the United Kingdom in
September 2014 and the on-going political/judicial struggle for carrying out similar ref-
erendums in Spain, most notably in Catalonia, represent only the latest and most extreme
examples of the influence that regionalist parties exert on several established democra-
cies. In the past decades, regionalist parties have contributed to triggering a general pro-
cess of territorial reforms resulting in incremental transfers of powers from the state to the
regions (Hooghe et al., 2010). Their policy success largely originates from their electoral
1Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Gediz University, Izmir, Turkey
2Department of Political Science, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
Corresponding author:
Emanuele Massetti, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Gediz University, Seyrek,
Menemen, Izmir 35665, Turkey.
Email: emanuele.massetti@gediz.edu.tr
644612PSX0010.1177/0032321716644612Political StudiesMassetti and Schakel
research-article2016
Article
Massetti and Schakel 433
success (De Winter, 1998: 238–239), which in turn allows them to put pressure on state-
wide parties in multiple ways: posing an electoral threat to one (or more) of them, being
voted into office at regional level and using the regional institutions to negotiate with the
central institutions, or even becoming relevant parties in the national parliament (Alonso,
2012; Field, 2015; Meguid, 2008; Toubeau and Massetti, 2013). It should not come as a
surprise, therefore, if the literature on regionalist parties has mainly focused on the
sources of their electoral success (Goldin, 2001; Sorens, 2005, 2004; Tronconi, 2006).
This scholarship has confirmed the importance of historical-sociological variables that
had already been pointed out in earlier studies (Rokkan and Urwin, 1983). Yet stark disa-
greement remains on the effect of some institutional factors and, primarily, on the effect
of the decentralisation reforms.
We want to contribute to this scholarship by addressing a still open controversy on the
explanatory value of two alternative theses. On the one hand, some scholars have pro-
posed what we label the ‘accommodation thesis’, which sees decentralisation as a strat-
egy adopted by state-wide parties in order to appease regionalist parties and deprive
them of their raison d’être, thus undermining their electoral strength (De Winter, 2006;
Levi and Hechter, 1985; Rudolph and Thompson, 1985). On the other hand, other schol-
ars have proposed what we label the ‘empowerment thesis’ which sees decentralisation
as providing a more favourable institutional environment in which regionalist parties
can flourish (Brancati, 2008). Adding to the controversy, some scholars have recently
suggested that decentralisation does not strengthen (nor weaken) regionalist parties
(Lublin, 2012), while others have proposed that the effect of decentralisation on indi-
vidual regionalist parties depends on their centre-periphery ideological radicalism and
on whether regional or national elections are considered (Massetti and Schakel, 2013).
These contrasting findings, and the fact that these studies employ a variety of research
designs – for example, a focus on individual parties or aggregate electoral scores, many
or few countries, national or regional elections – suggest that decentralisation can have
a complex and multifold effect. Hence, the main challenge of this article lies in identify-
ing the scope conditions which lead empowerment or accommodation to prevail within
the remit of Western democracies.
We argue that these contrasting findings can be reconciled by conceptualising decen-
tralisation both as an event – that is, the establishment of an elected regional tier of gov-
ernment – and as a process – that is, all transfers of powers from the centre to regions that
might precede and, most commonly, follow the establishment of elected regional govern-
ments. We hypothesise that the establishment of a regional electoral arena accommodates
pre-existing (‘before’) regionalist parties but, at the same time, provides opportunities for
political entrepreneurs to establish new (‘after’) regionalist parties. Whether this process
leads to larger aggregate/total vote share for regionalist parties depends on (1) the effects
of further decentralisation reforms on ‘before’ and ‘after’ parties and (2) whether ‘after’
parties are ‘original’ (genuinely new) or are break-ups from ‘before’ parties. We expect
that further decentralisation reforms (i.e. decentralisation as a process) strengthen ‘after’
parties – starting from regional elections and using the regional electoral arena as a
‘springboard’ into the national electoral arena (Brancati, 2008). However, empowerment
may be offset by electoral losses for ‘before’ parties to the extent that ‘after’ parties are
‘splinters’ – that is, their leaders, members and voters come from the (‘before’) party of
origin. By classifying parties according to their relative birthday and origin, we are able
to provide a more exhaustive evaluation of the causal mechanisms between decentralisa-
tion reforms and total electoral strength for regionalist parties.
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