Territory, Ethnicity and Social Democracy

The increasing salience of the ethnic/territorial issue-dimension and the growing territorialisation of electoral support and party competition have substantially altered the structure of party systems and challenged the relevance of existing models of party democracy. The work dealing with these transformations has largely emerged from strands literature that rarely intersect: studies on ethnicity and party systems (Birnir 2007; Brancati 2009); studies on federalism and party systems (Chibbher and Kollman 2004; Filipov, Ordershook, Shvetsova 2004); studies on multi-level party competition ( Jeffery and Hough 2006; Swenden and Maddens 2009); and classical studies on party systems. In particular, there seem to be various ways of studying these transformations depending on whether we adopt a genetic (Lipset and Rokkan 1967), morphological (Sartori 1976) or spatial (Downs 1957) approach to party competition. How can these transformations be understood? And how can their elucidation be helped by linking different approaches to party competition? In answer to these questions, this paper focuses on the role of Social Democratic parties in six countries (Belgium, Canada, India, Spain, UK, Romania). i) It focuses first on their decision to accommodate the demands of ethnic minorities, to compete on the ethnic/territorial dimension and to decentralise authority. The main justification for this choice of party family is that it is ubiquitous across countries (thus enabling a broad empirical coverage) and it displays conflicting ideological traditions on these issues. ii) It then focuses on their role in fulfilling two functions that can reveal how to unify the different approaches to party competition: a) following and shaping public preferences on the ethnic/territorial dimensions at different levels of competition; b) influencing the relationship between the ethnic/territorial and the left-right dimensions of competition and the mechanics of competition at different levels of competition.