Varieties of Opposition: Regionalism and Populism in Western Europe, 1990 - 2010

• In Event: Geography of Discontent

Abstract

In recent decades, populism has been on the rise across Western Europe, disrupting national and international politics alike. However, the rise of populism also entails consequences for the regional level: in December 2018, the radical-right populist party “Vox” won more than 10% of the seats in the Andalusian regional parliament. Of special relevance in such regional contexts is the under-studied interaction between populists and regionalist parties on the latter’s traditional home turf.
Both groups of parties define themselves in opposition to the ruling elite, albeit on different grounds: While regionalists politicize the special character of a region in contrast to the larger population of the state (Fitjar 2010), populists are concerned more generally with the antagonistic relation between the morally “pure people” whose popular sovereignty is to be defended against the “corrupt elites” (Mudde, 2004, p. 543). What is more, both party types can overlap in practice: Some populist parties such as the Flemish Interest have distinctly regionalist origins, while in January 2019, the regionalist South Tyrolean People’s Party announced a coalition with the populist Lega, which itself has regionalist roots. At the same time, we also observe enduring support for non-populist regionalist parties, such as the Scottish National Party or the coalition seeking Catalan independence.
Heinisch et al. (2018) are the first to address the overlap between the two empirical phenomena through a systematic mapping drawing on a series of case studies in the Western European context. However, it remains unclear what explains the variation in ideology and electoral success. How populism operates on the home turf of regionalist parties, to what extent populist and regionalist parties indeed follow a parallel logic of political opposition to central government and in which regards reasons for their support differ, particularly once we move from the level of individual cases to quantitative comparative analysis, remains to be studied.
We seek to address these gaps by assessing the relationship between regionalism, populism and electoral success in the European context in a comparative setting. Which are common and distinctive drivers of populist and regionalist electoral support in Western European sub-national politics? We propose to conceive populism and regionalism as distinct but compatible ideologies. In a context of transnational politicization, both distinguish themselves from mainstream parties by competing on the political community cleavage, which makes it possible to analyze systematic differences and commonalities underlying their electoral success. We distinguish between three groups of parties competing in regional elections: populists, regionalists and hybrid cases of populist regionalism. First, we expect that deviation from central government economic and political-community issue positions jointly support all three groups’ electoral success. Further, we posit that parties will electorally benefit more strongly from opposition to national mainstream parties at the regional level when fusing regionalist with populist ideology. Finally, we argue that populist parties without a regionalist agenda will enjoy lower electoral support when competing against established regionalist parties.
We assess our theoretical framework through quantitative comparison of election- and party ideology data in regional elections in Western Europe between 1990 and 2010. Among others, we rely on data by Massetti and Schakel (2013) on regionalist parties, and a comprehensive qualitative categorization of populist parties developed by Rooduijn (2018). Employing fractional response models, we find that our threefold distinction is critical for understanding political competition on the regional level. Indeed, populist and regionalist ideologies are systematically contributing to electoral success in European multilevel politics. While joint drivers in opposition to central government mainstream parties can be identified, the specific configuration of party ideology and their interactions suggest competition as well as compatibility among populists, regionalists and populist regionalists.
We contribute to the literatures in comparative politics and federalism by proposing a typology of opposition parties competing on the regional level that reflects the strategic environment of European multilevel politics. In addition, we move the analysis of populist parties from the national to the regional level, which allows us to appropriately model the interaction of populists and regionalist parties. Finally, while acknowledging the valuable findings from case study evidence, we address external validity issues by offering a large scale comparative analysis of the opportunity structures and electoral success of regionalist and populist parties in Europe.

Authors

• Friederike Luise Kelle, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin/ Berlin Social Science Center

• Cedric Koch, WZB