Understanding the Construction of Regional Welfare Discourses in Scotland and the Basque Country: How Ethnic Minority Parties Use the Symbolic Significance of Social Policy Institutions to Contest Nation-State Hegemonies

The decentralization of political authority in contemporary Europe has given way to a new opportunity, or perhaps a new obstacle, for regional and ethnic minority parties. In the past, their discourse production focused on a single dimension of political struggle: the status of their community vis-à-vis central authorities in what is often termed a “center-periphery” cleavage (Rokkan and Urwin, 1983.) These parties are still portrayed as using welfare issues in a purely targeted manner. For example, to further polarization in processes of “ethnic outbidding” (i.e., Zuber, 2012) as all other dimensions of political contention are “subsumed” (Massetti and Schackel, 2015) for them into center-periphery tensions. Nevertheless, the new reality has led them to regard the symbolic significance of welfare-related institutions as a primordial issue in their mobilization and discursive strategies as they gain political authority over them. I argue that two main discursive processes are distinctive to ethnic minority parties: Firstly, congruence crystalizes the elemental norms and values of ethnic communities into policy preferences; and secondly, nation-building efforts lead them to generate a distinct degree of solidarity and sense of belonging. In other words, they attempt to create their own regional “social citizenship” status bound to regional group identities. I apply Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) analysis to party manifestos from the Scottish National Party and the Basque National Party in the last two decades to further investigate this phenomenon. With the objective of disentangling the uses of social policy discourse by ethnonational parties, focusing on strategies of predication, argumentation, and perspectivation. The insights DHA provides are also useful to this research because of its emphasis on strategic action. In this case, party manifestos are conceptualized as an arena for contention between parties. Ethnonational parties aim to use social policy discourse as a means to contest nation-state hegemony fostered through its welfare-related institutions, but also use it to create their own nation-building projects by (re)producing their particular power relations embedded in a specific social and institutional context. This study takes a first step toward bridging the gap to understand how ethnic minority parties influence social policymaking as well as some of the discursive dynamics of contention over welfare policies in multilevel institutional contexts. Consequently, prominent emphasis is placed on contextuality and intertextuality.