Nationalist parties in Spain and the UK: Disentangling “policy packages” along the centre-periphery dimension

The centre-periphery dimension of electoral competition is too complex to be captured with just one or two all-embracing labels such as “decentralisation” or “nationalism”. The position that a party occupies along the centre–periphery dimension is the aggregate of the party’s policy preferences in each of the dimension’s constituent components. The implication is that the same position can be reached through different combinations of cultural, economic, administrative, institutional, and constitutional policy preferences.

In this paper, we propose a methodology for coding parties’ centre-periphery preferences as reflected in their manifestos. Our methodology is an extension of the Manifesto Project’s content-analysis methodology. We have elaborated a multi-level classification scheme for the codification of manifestos in multi-level settings that captures centre-periphery preferences in all their diversity and versatility. Our data fill in a double empirical gap within the field: on the one hand, the scarcity of data to estimate the policy preferences and positions of political parties along the centre-periphery dimension and the resulting absence of a centre-periphery scale for common use among scholars; on the other, the scarcity of data on parties’ policy preferences and positions at sub-state electoral levels.

We shall apply this methodology to content-analyze the manifestos of the main nationalist parties of Spain and UK (namely: CiU, PNV, BNG, CC, SNP and PC) in the last regional elections (2009-2011). Our main objective is to be able to disentangle the diverse components of the nationalist “policy package” and to show the different ways in which a peripheral party can present its nationalist/regionalist credentials according to the strategic needs imposed by the particular context of competition.