There has recently been an upsurge of the territorial party compe-
tition in Europe, and Croatia has followed the trend. However, con-
sidering the strong tendencies of national homogenization during and
in the aftermath of the Croatian war for independence, a success of
a regionalist party is surprising. Following the framework of external
and internal resources in studying regionalist parties, this paper aims
to study the strategy of Croatian Democratic Alliance of Slavonia and
Baranja (HDSSB), a regionalist party developed in the ethnically ho-
mogeneous Croatian region of Slavonia and Baranja. To better capture
the dierent strategies of regionalist parties, a new categorization of
regionalist parties is proposed, relying on the dimensions of territorial
party competition, self-government and ethnonational. Juxtaposing
those two dimensions produces four theoretical categories of regionalist
parties. To place the HDSSB in one category, the qualitative content
analysis of newspaper articles and self-produced content is performed,
and the positions of the party on several dimensions of party com-
petition are analyzed. The results suggest the HDSSB falls into the
regionalist patriot category of regionalist parties, as it argues for ter-
ritorial restructuring of the state, but is attached to the population in
the center. The reasons for such a placement are found in the oppor-
tunity of HDSSB to refer to the poverty of Slavonia and centralization,
as well as in constraints that HDSSB faced: present cleavages, territo-
rial history of Croatia, the role of Slavonia and the party leader in the
war for independence and HDSSB organizational features as splinter
party of HDZ. The case study also presents and tentatively accounts
for the party electoral fortunes from 2005 to the last national elections
on November 8, 2015. Future research should focus more on the rise
of regionalist political parties and their demands for self-government
in poor regions and centralized states.
