Información General

• Autores: Sonia Alonso Sáenz de Oger
• Editores: Oxford University Press
• Año de publicación: 2012
• Colecciones: Comparative politics
• País: Reino Unido
• Idioma: inglés
• ISBN: 978-0-19-969157-9
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)

Resumen

• How do state parties react to the challenge of peripheral parties demanding political power to be devolved to their culturally distinct territories? Is devolution the best response to these demands? Why do governments implement devolution given the high risk that devolution will encourage peripheral parties to demand ever more devolved powers? The aim of this book is to answer these questions through a comparative analysis of devolution in four European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The book argues that electoral competition between state and peripheral parties pushes some state parties to prefer devolution when their state-wide majorities or pluralities are seriously at risk. Devolution is an electoral strategy adopted in order to make it more difficult in the long term for peripheral parties to increase their electoral support by claiming the monopoly of representation of the peripheral territory and the people in it. The strategy of devolution is preferred over short-term tactics of convergence towards the peripheral programmatic agenda because the pro-periphery tactics of state parties in unitary centralized states are not credible in the eyes of voters. The price that state parties pay for making their electoral tactics credible is the ‘entrenchment’ of the devolution programmatic agenda in the electoral arena. The final implication of this argument is that in democratic systems devolution is not a decision to protect the state from the secessionist threat. It is, instead, a decision by state parties to protect their needed electoral majorities.

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