A consistent three-level regional empowerment strategy?: Evaluating regionalist parties’ territorial demands from legislative and policy proposals in regional, national and European parliamentary arenas

Regionalist parties seek territorial empowerment for their regions. On the centre-periphery spectrum, regionalist parties want to achieve, preserve, re-organise, or expand ‘some kind of [regional] self-government’ (De Winter, 2003, p. 204). West European regionalist parties have formulated these empowerment aspirations – in the form of territorial demands – in relation to the central state (Mazzoleni & Mueller, 2017) and, with the deepening of European integration from the 1980s onwards, to the European level of governance (Elias, 2009). So far, and somewhat surprisingly, most research has evaluated regionalist parties’ territorial demands only in terms of objectives (be it long-, medium- or short-term ones) stated in party materials or estimated by experts, capturing what these actors plan to accomplish should they obtain the necessary political power (Elias et al., 2021; Alonso et al., 2013; Jolly et al., 2022). This contribution advances the extant scholarship by investigating what regionalist parties actively undertake to empower their territory once they are ‘in’, i.e. elected into parliaments and given legislative initiative. More specifically, it analyses proposals that regionalist parties put forward intended to become law and effective policies leading to territorial empowerment. Regionalist parties are not represented only in regional assemblies (their core reference level) but generally also in statewide parliaments and many in the European organs (the European Parliament and the Committee of the Regions). Therefore, situated within the literature on regional emancipation within EU multi-level governance (McGarry & Keating, 2006; Lynch, 1998) and building on Deschuwer’s (2003) conceptualisation of party interaction in multi-level contexts, I explore regionalist parties’ territorial strategies at the regional, national and European level in terms of content and consistency. To provide a heterogenous empirical base, the case selection includes three different parties from three different political settings – the autonomist-federalist Südtiroler Volkspartei (South Tyrol/Italy), the autonomist Femu a Corsica (Corsica/France) and the secessionist Plaid Cymru (Wales/United Kingdom). To identify, extract and analyse territorial demands contained in the legislative and policy proposals submitted via all channels in the selected regional, state and EU parliamentary arenas over a recent five-year period (2017-2022), the FraTerr (Elias et al., 2021) coding scheme is applied. Within over 5300 proposals, more than 700 territorial demands were identified. As a general trend, I find a striking cross-level consistency in all three cases in the substantive content of the demands raised, i.e. the type of regional empowerment, the territorial level in relation to which the region should be empowered and the concrete policy area to which it relates, as well as in justification. This suggests that, in territorial matters, regionalist parties consciously coordinate their actions across all territorial levels and use the available legislative channels to change the territorial status quo in their favour. Besides several cross-level patterns, the analysis has revealed surprising individual findings, such as no demands for independence in the case of the secessionist PC. Using novel data from a three-level perspective, these findings provide valuable and detailed insight into how regionalist parties attempt to effectuate regional empowerment in Europe.