New Politics for the Territory? How Regionalist Parties in Italy, Spain, and the UK Deal with the Issue of Democratic Regeneration

The economic and political crisis in the shadow of the Great Recession in Europe contributed to processes of change in many West European party systems. While the modification of electoral alignments in some countries favoured the radical left or right, in others it led to the rise of new populist and anti-elitist parties campaigning for a regeneration of democracy and successfully bringing this issue on the political agenda at national and regional level. The objective of this article is to analyse electoral strategies of regionalist parties with regard to new politics, in concrete by looking at the salience of issues concerning democratic regeneration in their party manifestos. Using data from the Regional Manifestos Project, we compare parties across three West European countries – namely Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom – where the centre-periphery cleavage is highly salient and where changes in electoral alignments are transforming partisan politics. The article on the one hand shows the effects of the transformation of partisan politics at regional level, which led to an increasing importance of issues concerning democratic regeneration in party competition, and on the other hand, the capacity of regionalist actors to strategize beyond the centre-periphery cleavage in competing with mainstream and new politics parties.