Identity Construction and Political Attitudes Towards Federalism in Capital Regions

The last decades of regionalisation studies have taught us that collective identity plays a key role in citizens' attitudes towards the state and towards federalism as a potential political system. Literature has often focused on state-less nations or regions with an otherwise highly distinct identity, where citizens' relation with the state is (usually) one of tension and negotiation. This paper contributes to our existing knowledge of the construction and salience of regional identity by analysing a non-traditional and understudied case: Madrid, a capital region that only became political and administrative entity during the Spanish democratic transition, and which arguably (discursively) presents a blurred regional/state identity and an overly centralising political culture. This paper thus opens the 'black box' of capital regions and their construction of distinct political cultures. Through the case study of Madrid (and Spanish) identity, it addresses how a capital city and the larger region to which it belongs relate to each other; how citizens living in the region view their closeness to the state; and, last but not least, how Madrid compares to capital regions of other (quasi-)federalised states such as Brussels (Belgium) or Ottawa-Gatineau (Canada). For this level of micro- and meso-analysis, the paper draws from surveys and narrative interviews to citizens from Madrid across different generations, to understand the socialisation mechanisms that may have affected both their identification and their policy preferences regarding federalisation. The result is an in-depth understanding of how identity in and around Madrid has developed in the context of a (quasi-)federal, Europeanised Spain. By studying the particular mechanisms that influence citizens' attitudes towards the state, this presentation addresses the boundaries of (the imagined community of) Madrid as a capital region, as well as the political culture that feeds into and grows from the experiences of Madrid citizens. This political culture reveals tensioned and juxtaposing relations with both the state and other regions of the country, as well as paradoxical attitudes towards devolution and towards the autonomy of the own capital region. This presentation's focus on the relationship between identity construction and the political cultures of capital regions makes it a suitable contribution to the proposed panel "Collective identities" (chaired by Martin Neumann).