Anwen Elias

Introduction: Whatever Happened to the Europe of the Regions? Revisiting the Regional Dimension of European Politics

In European politics, the idea of a ‘Europe of the Regions’ came to the fore in the 1980s and early 1990s, in response to innovative policy and institutional developments in European integration. Different subnational actors saw in these developments the potential for creating an alternative supranational framework for meeting their territorial and other policy goals. Scholars of the European Union were also inspired to develop new theories and concepts for explaining decision making within a multi-level European polity. In recent years, however, as the limitations for regional mobilization within the EU have become more apparent, the notion of a ‘Europe of the Regions’ has fallen out of favour. One unfortunate consequence of this has been that the regional dimension of European politics has become increasingly neglected. This Introduction makes the case for the need to revisit the regional dimension to European politics. After summarizing the rise and fall of the ‘Europe of the Regions’ idea, the numerous ways in which the EU remains highly important for regions, and in which regional politics plays a significant role in shaping the nature and direction of European integration, are outlined. The Introduction concludes by summarizing how the contributions to this Special Issue take up the challenge of re-examining this regional dimension within an ever-changing and ever-expanding Europe.

From Protest to Power : Autonomist parties in government

In many Western European states, an increasing number of autonomist parties are taking part in government at state and regional levels. To date, however, scholars have paid little attention to the repercussions of government incumbency for these actors. This article aims to take a first step towards redressing this oversight. Based on an extensive literature examining political parties in government, we formulate hypotheses about how autonomist parties will approach, behave within and be affected by government office. We test these hypotheses by examining the participation of autonomist parties in regional and state governments in Western Europe since 1945. The findings demonstrate that the difficult decisions autonomist parties must make when entering government, the subsequent dilemmas and challenges that must be resolved once the threshold of government has been crossed, and the consequences of government incumbency, are similar to those faced by any political party in government. However, the fact that autonomist parties operate within a multi-level political context can render these challenges more complex than is the case for political parties operating (mainly or exclusively) at a single territorial level, usually that of the state. The article concludes by identifying key factors that affect the success of autonomist parties in government.

Position, selective emphasis and framing : How parties deal with a second dimension in competition

This Special Issue aims to (1) theorise party strategies in multi-dimensional policy spaces; and (2) apply the theory to party competition in multinational democracies characterised by a salient territorial dimension alongside a more established economic dimension. The introductory article brings together recent contributions treating spatial and salience theories as compatible and policy spaces as two-dimensional to propose four party strategies that can be ranked from one- to two-dimensional competitive behaviour: uni-dimensionality, blurring, subsuming, and two- dimensionality. The remaining contributions operationalise these strategies and draw on a variety of data sources ranging from manifestos to parliamentary bill proposals and expert surveys to describe when and explore why parties use these strategies in competition, focusing on patterns of party competition in multinational democracies, selected as typical cases of multi-dimensional competition.

Catalan Independence and the Challenge of Credibility: The Causes and Consequences of Catalan Nationalist Parties’ Strategic Behavior

This contribution examines the role of Convergència i Unió and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya in putting the issue of Catalonias constitutional relationship with the rest of Spain at the top of the Catalan and Spanish political agenda. It focuses on the strategic behavior of these two parties in pursuit of their territorial goals since 1978 and identifies the complex dynamics that led both parties to converge around a shared commitment to Catalan sovereignty. It is argued that the extent to which past strategic decisions have strengthened or weakened nationalist parties’ credibility on their core business of territorial empowerment has a significant impact on the options currently available to them as they seek a satisfactory answer to the Catalan question.

The 2007 Welsh Assembly Election

The third election to the devolved National Assembly for Wales (NAW) took place on 3 May 2007. The election produced a result that was, on the surface at least, wholly unremarkable. The governing Labour Party, against a background of general unpopularity for the party across the UK, lost a small amount of ground; the main opposition parties made modest gains without enjoying any major breakthroughs. Yet, when the election result is examined in greater detail, the outcome looks far more interesting and suggests some significant and far-reaching consequences for Welsh politics. After briefly outlining the context within which the election took place, and summarizing the results, the article turns to consider the implications of the election in greater detail. The 2007 election may be most significant for providing further evidence of the decline of Labour Party dominance in Wales. Labour in Wales has enjoyed a sustained hegemony that has few parallels in the democratic world. But the 2007 election may well have marked the final fracturing of this hegemony, with both immediate consequences for the governance of Wales, as well as longer-term consequences for the establishment of a more genuinely competitive party politics within Wales.

Making the economic case for independence: The Scottish National Party’s electoral strategy in post-devolution Scotland

ABSTRACT This article examines the strategic behaviour of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in regional elections from 1999 to 2016. It builds on recent work that has theorized the kind of strategic tools regionalist parties have at their disposal in electoral competition, and the factors expected to determine the strategic choices these parties make. An in-depth case study of the SNP describes when and explores why the party makes strategic choices in an effort to bolster its electoral support in post-devolution Scotland. The analysis finds (i) that the SNP has consistently sought to ‘frame’ the issue of independence in economic terms, by advancing an economic case for separating Scotland from the UK and (ii) that this strategic approach is the result of competing constraints internal and external to the party. These findings suggest that the strategic behaviour of regionalist parties in electoral competition is more sophisticated than expected by extant theoretical accounts.

Institutionelle Opportunitäten und regionalistische Bewegungen aus vergleichender Perspektive

Mobilisierungsbemuhungen regionalistischer und nationalistischer Krafte an der Peripherie eines Staates, die ublicherweise die Hoheit der Zentralregierung uber ein Gebiet anfechten, das sich in geschichtlicher, kultureller, sprachlicher oder wirtschaftlicher Hinsicht vom Zentralstaat unterscheidet, sind schon lange Bestandteil politischer Dynamiken in vielen westeuropaischen Landern. In den letzten Jahren traten jedoch vielerorts wieder verstarkt territoriale Spannungen auf. Regionalistische und nationalistische Parteien (RNP) haben an Grose und Starke gewonnen und zogen vermehrt in Regierungen auf regionaler und (seltener) zentralstaatlicher Ebene ein (Elias / Tronconi, 2011).