Regionalist Parties and Minister Portfolio Allocation: A Shift in Policy Preferences?

This study investigates whether government participation has an impact on the programmatic party strategy of regionalist parties. Indeed, an increasing amount of them has participated in regional or in national government. Ideological shifts have been widely researched for incumbent ‘traditional’ and ‘state-wide’ party families but not so for the regionalist party type. Minister portfolio allocation is a reliable indicator of a party’s policy preferences and a clear reflection of the programmatic party strategy. Therefore, this paper makes use of a novel dataset to estimate regionalist parties’ preferences by mapping the policy domains they claim for their ministers. A large sample of governing regionalist parties across Western democracies is observed throughout the postwar II period. Quantitative analysis shows that during their first legislature in government regionalist parties keep close to issues belonging to their territorial core business. Consecutive legislatures in executive power trigger a process of ideological “broadening” whereby regionalist parties select minister portfolios located on the social-economic and liberal-authoritarianism dimensions of party competition. These findings help to understand the programmatic strategies regionalist parties employ once they enter government as well as the effect that government participation has on regionalist parties’ ideological profile over time.