Perceptions of the centre-periphery conflict and their impact on attitudes towards multilevel government

Paper proposal for consideration for Panel 4: Public Opinion Towards Devolution and Federalism. The centre-periphery conflict has a big impact on several individual attitudes such as voting behaviour, trust in government, and satisfaction with the political system. However, citizens’ perceptions of this conflict have not been explored systematically with regards to its impact on the perceived legitimacy of public policy decisions taken in a multilevel democracy. More specifically, we know very little about how (and to what extent) these centre-periphery perceptions affect the translation of diffuse support –i.e., basic and durable support for the system– for multilevel government into specific support –i.e., support for decisions and actions taken by actors operating within the system– for public policy decisions. We analyse attitudes of Norwegian citizens, and this is important for two reasons. First, in Norway citizens tend to have strong centre-periphery perceptions whereby citizens from the Northern and Western parts of Norway tend to have lower trust in national government. Hence, there is quite a bit of variation in centre-periphery perceptions in Norway. Second, Norway is a unitary country whereby the decision-making process is relatively centralised. Revealing that these perceptions indeed have an effect on the perceived legitimacy of policy decisions would imply that unitary countries are somewhat comparable to federal and regionalised countries. We measure diffuse support for the multilevel system in two dimensions: self-rule –i.e., authority exercised by a subnational government within its own jurisdiction– and shared rule –i.e., collaboration between national and subnational governments. We hypothesise that citizens who have more peripheral attitudes to value subnational governments more, and that they will be more willing to accept decisions made by the national government if the local and/or regional tiers indicate support for the decision. Similarly, citizens who position themselves on the centre should be more willing to accept a decision made by subnational governments when the national government also support it. We test these hypotheses through a survey experiment fielded to 1,200 respondents during Wave 19 of the Norwegian Citizen Panel in November 2020. Respondents were asked to what extent they would be willing to accept a decision taken by the local, regional, and national government. After indicating their initial willingness, respondents randomly received a treatment that informs them one of the remaining tiers, or both of them combined, also supports the decision. The results indicate that centre-periphery perceptions have an impact on how and to what extent diffuse support for multilevel governance translates into specific support for policy decisions. Our findings are important as they shed light to varying attitudes towards multilevel government in unitary countries.