Why do national governments implement devolution given the high risk that it will encourage peripheral parties to demand ever more devolved powers? The aim of Challenging the State is to answer this question through a comparative analysis of devolution in four European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

How do state parties react to the challenge of peripheral parties demanding political power to be devolved to their culturally distinct territories? Is devolution the best response to these demands? Why do national governments implement devolution given the high risk that devolution will encourage peripheral parties to demand ever more devolved powers? The aim of this book is to answer these questions through a comparative analysis of devolution in four European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The author argues that electoral competition between state and peripheral parties pushes some state parties to prefer devolution at some particular point in time. Devolution is an electoral strategy adopted in order to make it more difficult in the long term for peripheral parties to increase their electoral support by claiming the monopoly of representation of the peripheral territory and the people in it. The strategy of devolution is preferred over short-term tactics of convergence towards the peripheral programmatic agenda because the pro-periphery tactics of state parties in unitary centralised states are not credible in the eyes of voters. The price that state parties pay for making their electoral tactics credible is the 'entrenchment' of the devolution programmatic agenda in the electoral arena. The final implication of this argument is that in democratic systems devolution is not a decision to protect the state from the secessionist threat. It is, instead, a decision by state parties to protect their needed electoral majorities. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The Comparative Politics series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.

The Future of Representative Democracy poses important questions about representation, representative democracy and their future. Inspired by the last major investigation of the subject by Hanna Pitkin over four decades ago, this ambitious volume fills a major gap in the literature by examining the future of representative forms of democracy in terms of present-day trends and past theories of representative democracy. Aware of the pressing need for clarifying key concepts and institutional trends, the volume aims to break down barriers among disciplines and to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars. The contributors emphasise that representative democracy and its future is a subject of pressing scholarly concern and public importance. Paying close attention to the unfinished, two-centuries-old relationship between democracy and representation, this book offers a fresh perspective on current problems and dilemmas of representative democracy and the possible future development of new forms of democratic representation.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the dynamics of political and economic decentralization in contemporary regimes, this comprehensive Handbook offers a critical examination of how the decentralization of governance affects citizen well-being.

This book examines the political economy of devolution in Britain from the postwar period to the present. It situates devolution in Britain within an understanding of the partisan recalibration of political, economic and democratic scales (or levels) of the state. The author utilizes various explanatory tools to unpack complex social, economic, spatial and political phenomena across national, regional and local scales. The book further contributes to our conceptual understanding of decentralization as a broader, comparative, phenomenon. Particular emphasis is placed on examining why decentralization and devolution occur at particular points in time, which enables the investigation into how political and fiscal powers are (re)organized at different levels of the state.

Contesting Spain? The Dynamics of Nationalist Movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country offers an exploration of the dynamics behind contemporary shifts in the orientation of nationalist parties and movements with reference to Catalonia and the Basque country in Spain. The chapters were originally papers presented at a workshop held at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) in September 2014 as part of a research project on ‘The Dynamics of Nationalist Evolution in Contemporary Spain’, whose purpose was to gain a better understanding of why regionally-based nationalist movements have experienced shifting relationships with the Spanish state over time, in some periods appearing content with accommodation between central and regional government and at other times pushing to go beyond autonomist demands to seek sovereignty or even attain full independence. The volume is one of the first to focus comparatively on the rise of pro-sovereignty politics in mainstream nationalist parties, whose evolution has also featured more traditional impulses towards territorial accommodation within the wider state. Using the exceptionally rich laboratory provided by Spain, the book explores the dynamics behind shifts in the orientation of nationalist parties and movements once they have established themselves as electorally successful at regional level. Dimensions to the analysis include: the interaction of nationalist parties with central government; pressures from their support bases; competition between parties within the home region; and international influences. This title is innovative in bringing together experts with a range of disciplinary approaches: primarily political scientists but also historians and scholars located at the cusp between social sciences and humanities.

This book develops an exploratory theory of immigration in multilevel states addressing two themes: governance and political parties. It examines not only how, and by whom, immigration policy is decided and implemented at different levels, but also how it has become a key-issue of party competition across multilevel states.

This book addresses the process of decentralization in Italy, examined from the perspective of political parties. In particular, it assesses whether and to what extent the dynamics of party competition are likely to shape policy agenda and affect policy change. The author starts by providing a thorough account of the process and history of Italian decentralization and the policy outcomes achieved over time, before discussing how party attention to an issue triggers related policy changes (manipulation of salience). Next, the focus shifts to the concrete positions adopted by parties on decentralization to assess whether the pattern of party competition has been consensual or adversarial, and how this pattern influenced the process of reform (manipulation of position). Finally, the author examines the role of frames in party competition. This volume offers essential research that will prove useful to a variety of audiences, ranging from scholars of territorial and Italian politics to those interested in agenda-setting, policy change, and party politics.

How did the territorial Conservative Party adapt to devolution? This detailed analysis of the Scottish and Welsh Conservative Parties explains how they moved from campaigning against devolution to sitting in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. Tracing the processes of party change in both parties this study explains why the Welsh Conservatives unexpectedly embraced devolution while the Scottish Conservatives took much longer to accept that Westminster was no longer the priority. This book will be of interest to students of British, Scottish and Welsh politics and anyone who is interested in the Conservative Party. It also speaks to wider debates about the nature of devolution, party change and multi-level governance.

This book offers a broad overview of an important and ongoing transformation in relations between political parties and their closest supporters. It focuses on established parliamentary democracies, showing how the changing nature of party membership is affecting how political parties define themselves and the choices presented to voters.