Political Parties and Regional Diversity in Central and East European Countries

Abstract

Having survived two decades of state disintegration, the new and old unitary states in Central and Eastern Europe can be seen as a residual set of states that owe their stability to the territorial centralisation of political authority and the weakness of their remaining substate nationalisms. But persisting ethnocultural and historical identities linked to regions, increasing inter-regional socio-economic disparities and EU incentives provide significant resources and opportunities for the articulation and aggregation of regional interests. The panel asks how political parties accommodate regional diversity and divergence given the salience of unitarism for a stable statehood. Such accommodation strategies include specializing in representing particular regions, co-opting regional community leaders into statewide parties, office-seeking clientelism / distributive coalitions, reframing regional interests as socio-economic advocacy or de-emphasizing region-based conflicts as technical issues. Why do parties and party leaders opt for particular accommodation strategies? How do the practices of regional interest representation shape the organisation and campaigning of political parties? How do party strategies interact with EU incentives for regionalisation? What do the representational practices imply for the party system, the pattern of democracy and the identity of the state? To address these questions, the panel combines case studies with cross-national comparisons.

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