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Abstract
Stateless nationalist and regionalist parties are no longer niche players but part of the mainstream of west European party politics. Yet their significance has yet to penetrate the mainstream of scholarship in political science on parties and elections. This contribution explores why this is so, focusing on a pattern of methodological and geographical fragmentation of research on sub-state party competition which has limited the resonance of that research. But it also sets out areas where this is changing—most notably in the growing combination of sociological and institutional approaches, but also in the study of stateless nationalist and regionalist parties as parties of government, often challenging, at times partnering state-wide parties. The resulting intersection of state-wide and sub-state logics of party competition suggests an opportunity for rethinking what ‘mainstream’ means in understanding party competition in multi-level states.
Notes
A more common terminology is non-state-wide parties, or NSWPs.
I am grateful to Emanuele Massetti for these figures, which are drawn from his doctoral thesis to be presented at Sussex University, UK, on ‘Regionalist Parties’ Strategy Adaptation in Changing Political Environments: A Comparative Study of the Northern League, Plaid Cymru, the Scottish National Party and the South Tyrol People's Party’.
Entry to the German Bundestag normally requires parties to win 5% of the vote state-wide. The PDS failed to do this on three occasions (1990, 1994 and 2002), though on the first two occasions was ‘saved’ by variants on the 5% rule. Its failure in 2002 prompted the re-think which led to a merger with the west German ‘Electoral Alternative—Labour and Social Justice’ to form the Left Party.