Факторы формирования коалиционных правительств регионалистских и общенациональных политических партий в регионах Испании

Abstract

Received 09.09.2020. The paper focuses on one of the most significant arenas of multi-level politics – the interaction between regionalist and state-wide parties in the creation and functioning of government coalitions at the regional level. The research is aimed at determining the factors influencing the creation of such coalitions in which regionalist parties act as coalition partners with a specific agenda. Spain provides significant empirical material for research on this issue, where regionalist parties function in most regions, and state-wide parties often enter government coalitions with them at the level of autonomous communities. A comparative analysis of the practices of concluding coalition agreements between statewide and regionalist political parties in the regions of Spain during the democratic period is a key research method. The theoretical part of the article provides an overview of the theories of party coalitions accumulated by Political Science since the 1950s and updated by researchers due to actualization of new circumstances in the context of multilevel politics. The empirical part of the article examines the influence of three categories of factors on the construction of coalition deals between regionalist and state-wide political parties in the Spanish autonomous communities, including: the size of the coalition, the ideological inter-party distance (comprising the regionalist-ideological dimension) and correspondence of the alignments of party forces at the regional and national levels. The research demonstrates that the factor of coalition size is fundamental for transactions between regionalist and state-wide political parties, while the other two categories of factors manifest themselves situationally. Acknowledgements. The research was carried out at the expense of a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 19-18-00053 " Subnational regionalism and dynamics of multilevel politics (Russian and European practices)") at the Perm Federal Research Center of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.