MEASURING PARTY POSITIONING TOWARDS DECENTRALISATION: A CODING SCHEME - Draft paper about the development of a coding scheme for the content analysis of party manifestos and parliamentary debates

Regionalized systems emerge as the outcomes of external and endogenous pressures and following constitutional reforms, which are inevitably mediated by political actors. So far, however, literature has largely overlooked the role played by the latter in the process of territorial restructuring. However, whereas the processes of nation building have been actually driven by top-level actors, the last decades have witnessed an increasing politicisation of the territorial issue. Regionalist and ethnic mobilisation, widespread crises of efficiency of the central governments and the challenges posed by the process of globalisation have put under discussion the current distribution of powers within the states. Hence, the political actors are called upon to respond to these pressures that are challenging the current shape of the polities. Nonetheless, in democratic systems, politicians operate within and on behalf of political parties. Given such premises, my main contention is that in territorial policies, political parties matter. Accordingly, my main research question focuses on whether, to what extent and how the territorial dimension is formulated in the ideological platforms of the political parties. The relevance of such an enquiry lies just in the mediating role that parties are expected to accomplish in the legislative arena. This line of reasoning leads me to formulate a series of related sub-questions underlying my analysis. In particular: is the regionalist issue a salient dimension in the electoral discourse among parties? Has its relevance changed over the time and across parties? Once dealt with the problem of the saliency of the issue, however, it is necessary to understand whether there could be observed patterns of competition or convergence towards the issue of redistribution of powers. In other terms, do parties share the same views about the purported advantages of a further reallocation of competencies downwards or, rather, is the issue a source of party competition? The latter question implies to analyse the issue of decentralisation within the broader theoretical framework on party positioning, which draws a fundamental distinction between position and valence issues. The logic consequence of competitive or consensual patterns is the likelihood of contested or consensual reforms, once political parties enter the legislative arena. I will nevertheless explore a further, complementary- rather than alternative- perspective for the analysis of party competition on a single issue. In a nutshell, I will consider not only how much and in which direction parties “talk” about decentralisation, but also how the regionalist issue is framed in parties’ discourse. It implies to go beyond the mere patterns of convergence (or divergence) on the issue. By looking at the frames, in fact, it will be possible to distinguish between different, sometimes even contrasting, arguments used by national actors to justify their willingness (or reluctance) to surrender powers to the sub-national levels. The description of the patterns of party competition on the decentralist issue, represents a preliminary step before formulating some hypotheses over the likely determinants of such attitudes, as envisaged in a broader, encompassing theoretical model. In particular, I will examine whether ideological underpinnings, the shifts of public opinion, party position in the party system (e.g. mainstream or peripheral, governing or opposition) and the threat posed by the ethno-regionalist parties do actually influence parties’ views on the restructuring of the polity. In further step of the analysis, I will also look at the parliamentary debates and at the roll call votes in the occasion of the adoption of key decentralist reforms. In this way, I will address a second research question of, namely whether there is a gap between the electoral discourse and the legislative behaviour of political parties, once in the institutional arena.