Saturday, March 15, 2014
Governor's (Omni Shoreham)
The paper aims to test the relative validity of the ‘accommodation thesis’ – i.e. decentralization undermines regionalist parties’ electoral scores – and the ‘empowerment theory’ – i.e. decentralization strengthens regionalist parties’ electoral scores – and to refine them by distinguishing sub-groups of cases in which one of two trends appears to be dominant. We delve into the relationship between regional reform and regionalist party strength by looking at two types of parties (those emerged before and those emerged after the establishment of regional elections), two types of regions (‘constitutionally special’ and ‘ordinary’ regions) and two types of elections (national and regional). These distinctions are based on considerations concerning the partially different roles that regionalist parties play across the national and regional level of government; on the different relative strength of sociological drivers of regionalist mobilization across cases; and on the different effects of regionalist mobilization on the constitutional status of the region. We analyze total regionalist party vote shares for both regional and national elections held in 329 regions and 18 countries. The results provide conditioned support for both the empowerment and the accommodation thesis; and they confirm that the causal effect of regional reform depends on the type of region, type of party and type of election.
