'A Tale of Two Arena’s: How Do Regionalist Parties Strategically Behave When They Hold Power in Regional and National Government?' A Comparative Research Between Multi-Level Political Systems

An increasing amount of regionalist parties currently participates and/or has participated in executive office at the regional and/or national policy-level. Their programmatic dimension of (regionalist) party behaviour is examined here by applying quantitative discourse analysis to the Manifesto Project Database. From a salience point of view, regionalist parties can be regarded as a distinct party family since they develop a similar ideological pattern across time and space. While they share a common ‘niche-ness’ in stressing (de)centralization topics, they are internally most homogeneous on liberal-authoritarian issues. Weak empirical evidence was found for an increase in social-economic salience scores among the selected regionalist parties when they enter government, while their territorial salience scores tend to decrease at this point. This trend could point to an “inverse subsuming” party strategy.