Comparative Territorial Politics

Comparative Territorial Politics Chair: Dr Elodie Fabre is Lecturer in Politics at Queen’s University Belfast (UK). Her work in the fields of territorial politics and party politics has been published in journals such as Party Politics, Regional and Federal Studies, Regional Studies, and the European Journal of Political Research. In the aftermath of two referendums on the secession of a nation from a European state, the issue of politics in multilevel states has rarely been more relevant. The relations between central and sub-state levels of government and the way in which multinational states allow national minorities to govern themselves though federal or regional arrangements have dominated debates in a number of European countries, most notably the UK and Spain, while other countries are undergoing processes of territorial reform. Territorial politics is about these big constitutional issues, but it is also about the less attention-grabbing but nonetheless important issues of citizens’ attitudes towards multilevel government, voting behaviour and accountability, public policy, policy divergence and the distribution of resources between levels and across territorial units. The aims of this section are to explain and interpret the latest developments in the politics and policies of federal and regionalised countries; to integrate the study of these developments into the corpus of knowledge and theory; to do so in a way that encourages a pluralism of academic disciplines, theoretical approaches and methodological tools. This section includes panels on: - What’s next for stateless nations? Chair: André Lecours (University of Ottawa) - The National Question: Parties and Voters in Quebec and Scotland Chair: Eric Bélanger (McGill University) - Parties and election in multilevel countries (2 panels) Chairs: Anwen Elias (University of Aberystwyth) and Elodie Fabre (Queen’s University Belfast) - Civic Participation and Representative Institutions in Federations Chair: Sabine Kropp (Freie Universität Berlin) - Policy and accountability in multilevel systems. Chair: Sara Niedzwiecki (University of New Mexico ) - Policy Convergence and Divergence in Multi-Level States Chair: Simon Toubeau (University of Nottingham)