Regional(ised) Citizens? An Intergenerational, Qualitative Comparison of Citizen Attitudes towards Regionalisation

In a globalised and interconnected Europe, dreams of unification, deep integration or even exhaustive coordination are proving difficult to achieve. Not only do national borders play a large role in European political and cultural exchange, but so do sub-national divisions. Scholarship on policy and political attitudes is increasingly concerned with how citizens construct and perceive this multi-level structure in which they are embedded, and whether they support the almost-federalisation of multiple competences in their societies. To understand what accounts for citizen support to regionalisation, this project asks the question “How do citizens of different regions experience and make sense of (further) regionalisation?”. Building on the existing scholarship that identifies single explanatory variables of citizen attitudes towards regionalisation (regional identification, perceived wealth disparities, regionalist political discourse, and early-age socialisation in distinct political systems), the project intends to account for how these variables combine and what mechanisms articulate citizens’ (regional) policy experiences and their attitudes towards regionalisation. The research design seeks variation across the four variables identified in the literature. Case selection includes two European countries: Spain and Belgium. Within these two countries, the case selection focuses on extreme pairs regarding identification, perceived wealth competition, and historically regionalist political discourse: Madrid-Catalonia, and Wallonia-Flanders. The methods proposed are in-depth interviews of two different generations in each region (those who grew up in a centralised system and those who grew up in a quasi-federalised one), to also take into account socialisation. The project follows a constitutive analysis—an in-depth study of how citizen attitudes are constructed by individuals themselves. The results of this qualitative comparison will generate knowledge on the mechanisms that affect attitudes towards regionalisation from citizens’ (regional) policy experiences and perceptions, and it will reveal how citizens’ preferences are constructed discursively and interpretatively. This conference presentation will include preliminary findings based on a pilot in Wallonia.