New Research Agendas on Regional Party Competition

Abstract

Stateless nationalist and regionalist parties are no longer niche players but part of the mainstream of west European party politics. Yet their significance has yet to penetrate the mainstream of scholarship in political science on parties and elections. This contribution explores why this is so, focusing on a pattern of methodological and geographical fragmentation of research on sub-state party competition which has limited the resonance of that research. But it also sets out areas where this is changing—most notably in the growing combination of sociological and institutional approaches, but also in the study of stateless nationalist and regionalist parties as parties of government, often challenging, at times partnering state-wide parties. The resulting intersection of state-wide and sub-state logics of party competition suggests an opportunity for rethinking what ‘mainstream’ means in understanding party competition in multi-level states.