![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
This article examines the interaction between political decentralisation and state-wide parties’ strategies on territorial politics using Spain as a case study. It finds that electoral and territorial logics of action largely drive change. Parties in central government often become reluctant decentralisers as they seek to control the devolution process, unless they need the support of regionalist parties, whereas opposition parties tend to push for further decentralisation. Yet party strategies maintain a significant continuity over time as they are bound to particular ideologies which, in multinational countries, might translate into specific preferences for the territorial accommodation of culturally distinct regions. The article also shows that, under certain circumstances, some logics of action prevail over the others. Finally, while party politics significantly influences decentralisation, the article provides evidence of feedback effects of decentralisation on party strategies.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the special issue editors as well as the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments to a previous draft of this article. The author is also grateful to Elodie Fabre, Francesc Pallarés, Pablo Simón and Marc Guinjoan.
Notes
1 . The smaller state-wide party United Left (Izquierda Unida) is not examined here as it has not been a relevant actor in the decentralisation process.
2 . This might be due to the fact that the CMP categories ‘centralisation’ and ‘decentralisation’ are not subtle enough to distinguish explicit stances of support or rejection to devolution or to accurately extract party positions towards cultural minorities (see Alonso 2012: 134–35).
3 . Some authors classify non-state-wide parties according to the political project in relation to the territory and the people around which these parties define themselves. ‘Nationalist’ parties claim to represent a distinct nation from the state-wide one, whereas ‘regionalist’ parties aspire to represent certain particularities of their regions without demanding national differentiation (see Pallarés et al. 1997: 139). For the sake of simplicity, in this article we will refer to them all as ‘regionalist’ parties.
4 . This cross-period analysis allows us to assess how over-time change in key explanatory variables impacts on an evolving dependent variable (see Lieberman 2001: 1017).
5 . Article 2 also stated that Spain was composed of various ‘regions’ and ‘nationalities’. The latter was a neologism reserved for the ‘historical regions’, i.e. the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia, reducing the meaning of ‘nationality’ to that of a ‘cultural and linguistic community’.
6 . The Constitution established two different procedures for decentralisation justified on historical and political grounds, which differed both in speed of competence devolution and institutional development. The fast-track route was granted to the historical regions as well as to any other region fulfilling certain requisites (Aja 2003a).
7 . Various regionalist parties along with the Communist Party presented an appeal to the Constitutional Court. Plaintiffs sustained that regional constitutions (statutes of autonomy) could not be limited by a state-wide law. A third of its articles were declared unconstitutional in 1983.
8 . Andalusia gained access to the fast-track procedure despite failing to fulfil the requisites in one province (three-quarters of the towns failing to vote in favour in a referendum). The Canary Islands and Valencia also attained the highest competence level through an organic law of competence devolution. Navarre followed an additional clause of the Constitution.
9 . This does not apply to the Basque Country and Navarre which have exceptional fiscal formulas through which they collect all taxes and then transfer a proportion to the central government.
10 . It should be noted though that it has only been held in 1994, 1997 and 2005.
11 . Simultaneously, further negotiations with regionalist parties were rejected and sovereignty claims of some regions were fiercely contested. The central government included in the criminal code a prison sentence for convoking unauthorised referendums, a reform explicitly tailored for the Basque regional prime minister who had proposed a new arrangement of his region with Spain.
12 . This power was more informal than formal due to very moderate intra-party shared rule and the absence of regional leaders in the central executive board since 1997 (Méndez Lago 2005).
13 . Strictly speaking, the Basque Country did not undertake an institutional reform of its statute of autonomy but rather presented a proposal drafted by the Basque regional government.
14 . The PSOE formed pacts on an ad hoc basis with the state-wide party United Left and with several regionalist parties, most of them left-wing parties such as the Republican Left of Catalonia/Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) and the BNG. By the end of the legislative term the PSOE turned to CiU.
15 . Actually, the PSOE does not have a regional branch in Catalonia but a federated party, namely the Party of the Catalan Socialists/Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC).
16 . Regional statutes are passed first in regional parliaments and sent thereafter to the Congress of Deputies for definitive approval where they might be amended. In the case of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galician the statutes of autonomy are finally voted by the citizens of the region via referenda.
17 . For example, many of the articles of the Catalan statute legally contested by the PP were also included in the Andalusian statute whose reform had been opposed by the party in the Andalusian parliament but supported in the Congress of Deputies.
18 . The PP even proposed to the PSOE a reform of the electoral law aimed at reducing the weight of regionalist parties in the lower house (see PP, Pacto de Estado por la convivencia y el consenso constitucional en España, 2005).
19 . The mean difference of vote share in the general elections held from 1982 and 2008 favoured the PSOE by 19.9 per cent in Catalonia and by 9.2 per cent in the Basque Country. Despite both ACs having strong regionalist parties, the PSOE has generally come second as the most voted for party after the main regionalist party by a narrow margin of votes in the Basque Country, and has always been the most popular party in Catalonia. In 2011, though, the difference was dramatically reduced (3.5 per cent in the Basque Country and 5.6 per cent in Catalonia, where the PSOE was surpassed as the most voted party by CiU).
20 . The proposal is currently under elaboration and is expected to be presented in Autumn 2013 (El País 2012).