Political Economy of Regional Elite Splits

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics and History & International History and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics and History

Abstract

Under authoritarian regimes elite divisions drive political conflicts. Previous research has shown that intra-elite conflict shapes multiple political key aspects (Ansell and Samuels 2014), from suffrage expansions to fiscal or state capacity. Most of the previous literature has focused on the divisions between elites at the national level ―e.g. conservative landowners competing with liberal bourgeoisie. However, elites in many countries were also divided in geographic terms; regional elites’ ―e.g. Irish, Catalan or Hanoverian― were politically organized and run their own parties versus national elite candidates.
An elites’ split requires (re)organizing political parties and a geographically based split leads to the creation of new regional political parties. This paper follows the contribution by Rokkan and Urwin (1983) regarding peripheral mobilization and disentangles, empirically, under which conditions regional elites promote a regional party to confront central elites.
Using the case of Catalonia in Spain for the period 1890–1923, this paper uses municipality-level electoral, economic and sociodemographic data to analyze the split between regional and central elites and the rise of a regional party. Departing from the effects of 1898 independence of last Spanish colonies I use a diff-in-diff approach and instrumental variables (exposure to colonial trade), the paper tests the contribution of key contextual elements to the elites’ split. It shows that industrialization, economic preference shocks, and identity-based organizational capacity fostered the creation and larger levels of support to a regional elite party under a semi-competitive authoritarian regime.

Author

• Pau Vall-Prat, Universitat de Barcelona