Varieties of Opposition to Central Government: Regionalism and Populism in Western Europe, 1990–2010

In recent decades, populism has been on the rise across Western Europe, disrupting national and international politics. On the regional level, the radical-right populist party “Vox” won more than 10% in the Andalusian regional parliament in December 2018. How do populist and regionalist parties interact on the latter’s traditional home turf? Both groups of parties define themselves in opposition to the ruling elite, albeit on different grounds: While regionalists politicize regional identities (Fitjar 2010), populists are concerned with the antagonistic relation between the morally “pure people” whose popular sovereignty is threatened by “corrupt elites” (Mudde, 2004, p. 543). Some populist parties such as Flemish Interest have regionalist origins, in South Tyrol regionalists and populists plan a coalition, and we observe enduring support for regionalists like the Scottish National Party. Heinisch et al. (2018) address this overlap in a series of case studies in Western Europe. How populism operates on the regionalist level, to what extent populist and regionalist parties follow a parallel logic of political opposition to central government and whether voters’ motivations differ, particularly in large scale quantitative comparative analysis, remains to be studied. We seek to address these gaps by assessing the relationship between regionalism, populism and electoral success in the European context. Which are common and distinctive drivers of populist and regionalist electoral support in Western European sub-national politics? We propose to conceive of populism and regionalism as distinct but compatible ideologies, distinguishing themselves from mainstream parties by competing on the political community cleavage. We distinguish between three types: populists, regionalists and hybrids of populist regionalism. First, we expect that deviation from central government economic and political-community issue positions support all three groups’ electoral success. Further, in regional elections regio-populists benefit most strongly from opposition to national mainstream parties. Finally, populist parties enjoy lower electoral support when competing against established regionalists. We assess our theoretical framework through quantitative comparison of election- and party ideology data in regional elections in Western Europe between 1990 and 2010. We rely on data by Massetti and Schakel (2013) on regionalist parties, and a comprehensive qualitative categorization of populist parties developed by Rooduijn (2018). Employing fractional response models, we find that our threefold distinction is critical for understanding political competition on the regional level. Populist and regionalist ideologies are systematically contributing to electoral success. While joint drivers in opposition to central government mainstream parties can be identified, the specific configuration of party ideology and their interactions suggest competition as well as compatibility among the three types. We contribute to the comparative politics and federalism literatures by proposing a typology of opposition parties competing on the regional level that reflects the strategic environment of European multilevel politics. We move the analysis of populist parties from the national to the regional level to accurately model the interaction of populists and regionalists. Finally, while acknowledging valuable case study evidence, we address external validity issues by offering a large scale comparative analysis of the opportunity structures and electoral success of regionalist and populist parties in Europe.