Minority regions provide quasi-experimental conditions to explore how political parties respond to new issues in multi-dimensional competition: First, party competition takes place at least on a left/right and a centre/periphery dimension. Second, devolving new policy-making competencies to these regions introduces new issues into multi-dimensional policy spaces, forcing parties to respond. The paper makes use of this advantage and compares how political parties in Catalonia and South Tyrol respond to the devolution of competencies in the field of immigrant integration. Working hypotheses are: (1) regional branches of state-wide parties subsume the immigration issue under the left/right dimension, framing it in economic terms; (2) minority nationalist parties subsume the immigration issue under the centre/periphery dimension, framing it as a component of their nation-building project. The empirical analysis examines the adoption of the recent welcome law (“Llei d'acollida”, 2010) in Catalunya and the integration law (“Integrationsgesetz”, 2011) in South Tyrol.
