How Statewide Parties Cope with the Regionalist Issue: The Case of Spain; A Directional Approach

Abstract

In Chapter 8, Pieter van Houten considers a ‘principal-agent’ framework to assess the relationship between the statewide party and its regional branches, with regard to electoral campaigning, candidate selection and policy-making. Van Houten’s framework demonstrates how statewide parties vary their territorial strategies in terms of how they organize themselves, campaign and make policy. In this chapter, we will discuss the strategic positioning of statewide parties by focusing exclusively on their campaign content. To this end we have analysed electoral programmes (‘party manifestos’) for statewide and regional elections in Spain, held between 2000 and 2003. Spain is an ideal case study since the regional assemblies are elected in separate elections and regional party systems have developed which often contain one or more relevant regionalist parties (Pallarés et al., 1997).KeywordsCanary IslandBasque CountryRegionalist IssueDirectional TheoryInstitutional DimensionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.