Politics and Regionality: Does Region of Residence Affect the State’s Legitimacy?

Abstract

Even though the Spanish Constitution establishes that Spain is structured into Autonomous Communities and that the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity govern the relationship between the different regions, very often Spanish media publish news about territorial inequality, conflicts, and independency velleity. The objective of this investigation, avoiding digging into the reasons for these claims, is to identify whether the region of residence influences the legitimacy of the Spanish state. The legitimacy of the state is the degree of citizen’s support to the institutions. This support ensures the law compliance, the proper functioning of the country and citizen commitment with the social system. State’s legitimacy is very much linked with the trust on politics and politicians. In the regions characterized by independency issues and conflicts, state’s legitimacy will be limited, and the perception of the state’s meaning and power will be more fragile and instable. The effective and appropriate management of the state and the relevancy of the central politics would be complex in these regions and, finally, regional inequality and fragmentation will increase. To achieve this research objective, we carried out an analysis of the state’s legitimacy of each Spanish region considering the data extracted from the European Social Survey. The results of this research provide valuable information useful for regional political decision making and dig into the reasons why regional conflicts are rooted in the state’s institutions.