With respect for the core business: the impact of party ideology on the odds of government participation among regionalist parties

Lorenzo Terriere,Nicolas Bouteca

doi:10.14712/1803-8220/4_2020

Abstract

An increasing number of regionalist parties have participated in regional or national executive office. This article examines the specific conditions under which this party type increases its odds of successful cabinet entry – with a focus on ideological party change. Their programmatic profile is mapped before and after government entry by applying quantitative content analysis on coded electoral manifestos. The binary logistic regression analyses provide empirical evidence that regionalist parties that compromise on their territorial core business are more likely to enter (regional) government. Regionalist parties are also more likely to cross the threshold of (regional) governance when they operate in more decentralized countries and when they are a larger electoral factor in the regional political arena. Other relevant control variables, such as economic growth, national electoral score and party age, do not generate a significant effect on the odds of government participation.

Highlights

Over the past few decades, regionalist parties have gradually gained electoral strength across Western multi-level democracies
Only in Belgium (VU/N-VA, FDF/Défi, RW) and in Italy (LN) have regionalist parties been in this latter scenario
One fifth (21%: 35/167) of the manifestos belong to (14) regionalist parties that never governed in the years that their coded party platforms were included into the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR)- dataset

Summary

Introduction

Over the past few decades, regionalist parties have gradually gained electoral strength across Western multi-level democracies. Regionalist parties that decrease their emphasis on territorial topics increase their opportunities to effectively enter (regional) government, whereby this relationship intensifies when we control for the five variables in Block 2. This means that the evaluation of the third hypothesis is nuanced: more attention for socio-economic topics increases the odds of government participation while liberalismauthoritarianism issue salience doesn’t generate any impact.

Results

Conclusion