Think Croatian, act Slavonian: The Croatian Democratic Alliance of Slavonia and Baranja as a regionalist patriot

There has recently been an upsurge of the territorial party compe- tition in Europe, and Croatia has followed the trend. However, con- sidering the strong tendencies of national homogenization during and in the aftermath of the Croatian war for independence, a success of a regionalist party is surprising. Following the framework of external and internal resources in studying regionalist parties, this paper aims to study the strategy of Croatian Democratic Alliance of Slavonia and Baranja (HDSSB), a regionalist party developed in the ethnically ho- mogeneous Croatian region of Slavonia and Baranja. To better capture the dierent strategies of regionalist parties, a new categorization of regionalist parties is proposed, relying on the dimensions of territorial party competition, self-government and ethnonational. Juxtaposing those two dimensions produces four theoretical categories of regionalist parties. To place the HDSSB in one category, the qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles and self-produced content is performed, and the positions of the party on several dimensions of party com- petition are analyzed. The results suggest the HDSSB falls into the regionalist patriot category of regionalist parties, as it argues for ter- ritorial restructuring of the state, but is attached to the population in the center. The reasons for such a placement are found in the oppor- tunity of HDSSB to refer to the poverty of Slavonia and centralization, as well as in constraints that HDSSB faced: present cleavages, territo- rial history of Croatia, the role of Slavonia and the party leader in the war for independence and HDSSB organizational features as splinter party of HDZ. The case study also presents and tentatively accounts for the party electoral fortunes from 2005 to the last national elections on November 8, 2015. Future research should focus more on the rise of regionalist political parties and their demands for self-government in poor regions and centralized states.