“A federal tale of two arena’s : how do regionalist parties strategically behave when they hold power in regional and national government?”

An increasing amount of regionalist parties currently participates and/or has participated in executive office at the regional and/or national policy-level. Their programmatic dimension of (regionalist) party behaviour is examined here by applying quantitative discourse analysis to the Manifesto Project Database. From a salience point of view, regionalist parties can be regarded as a distinct party family since they develop a similar ideological pattern across time and space. While they share a common ‘niche-ness’ in stressing (de)centralization topics, they are internally most homogeneous on liberal-authoritarian issues. Weak empirical evidence was found for an increase in social-economic salience scores among the selected regionalist parties when they enter government, while their territorial salience scores tend to decrease at this point. This trend could point to an “inverse subsuming” party strategy

With respect for the core business : the impact of party ideology on the odds of government participation among regionalist parties

An increasing number of regionalist parties have participated in regional or national executive office. This article examines the specific conditions under which this party type increases its odds of successful cabinet entry – with a focus on ideological party change. Their programmatic profile is mapped before and after government entry by applying quantitative content analysis on coded electoral manifestos. The binary logistic regression analyses provide empirical evidence that regionalist parties that compromise on their territorial core business are more likely to enter (regional) government. Regionalist parties are also more likely to cross the threshold of (regional) governance when they operate in more decentralized countries and when they are a larger electoral factor in the regional political arena. Other relevant control variables, such as economic growth, national electoral score and party age, do not generate a significant effect on the odds of government participation

A federal tale of two arena’s : how do regionalist parties strategically behave when they hold power in regional and national government?

Regionalist and Sub-state Nationalist Parties (=”RSNPs”) have re-gained electoral momentum in Western multi-level democracies. An increasing amount of these parties currently participates and/or has participated in executive power at the regional and/or national level. Nowadays, the literature considers RSNPs as a distinct party category and as a structural actor in political party competition. Whilst the transition to holding power in executive office confronts RSNPs with the same strategic challenges as their “state-wide”, “established” counterparts, we hypothesize that they behave differently within a competitive political environment. In this paper I construct an explanatory model based on expectations we can hold from the existing literature. Subsequently, I wish to explore possible methodological avenues to empirically test the correctness of these expectations. To analyze and explain party behaviour I turn to discourse analysis. In this respect, the Manifesto Project Dataset is a well-established tool to process and compare the coded party platforms collected throughout different elections at the national level. In addition, the Regional Manifestos Group provides an innovative methodological instrument to assess regional data

‘With respect for the core business’ : on regionalist parties and their minister portfolios in government

This article investigates the relationship between regionalist parties and the minister portfolios they control in government. A novel dataset was constructed which inventories a comprehensive collection of their minister posts (N = 1779). These stem from 77 different regionalist parties across 10 Western multilevel democracies throughout the post-Second World War period (1945-2020). An in-depth analysis shows that governing regionalist parties adhere closely to their ideological core business: territorial, cultural and institutional affairs form a major part of their ministerial responsibilities. The kind of ministries that regionalist parties hold differs between the regional and national levels of government. They obtain more key leadership positions regionally than nationally. Regionalist parties own a disproportionately high number of minister posts at the national level when compared with their actual seat share in parliament. The results from this study improve our understanding of the portfolio preferences and party strategies that regionalist parties employ when they participate in government