Why Regions Matter: Small Worlds in Comparative Perspective

Ailsa Henderson, Ailsa Henderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317979630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Bringing together experts on regionalism and federalism this collection explores the impact of legislative regions on parties and voters. It reflects on the 1980 publication of Small Worlds by David Elkins and Richard Simeon, which outlined how and why voters and policies differ across Canadian provinces. Using recent data, the essays in this collection provide a comparative re-examination of the impact of regions.

The book explores attitude divergence in Canada and in the US, the role and impact of regional parties in Quebec, Scotland and Bavaria, the impact of multi-level governance on how citizens understand and discharge their duties and the capacity of sub-state political systems to influence general political attitudes. The result is an empirical and analytical contribution to regionalism and federalism studies that demonstrates how and why regions matter.

This book was published as a special issue of Regional and Federal Studies.

Why Regions Matter: Sub-state Polities in Comparative Perspective

AILSA HENDERSON
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Introduction

Thirty years ago, David Elkins and Richard Simeon edited a collection of essays, entitled Small Worlds, on the importance of regions. Their focus was on Canadian provinces and the very real differences across the country in terms of political attitudes and behaviour. Citizens in Quebec, and those in British Columbia or Nova Scotia, held different expectations of government, different policy preferences and supported political parties to differing degrees. At the same time, regional variations were also evident in the way provincial governments pursued social policies. Whether diversity had a consequent effect on national unity or stability formed an overarching theme of the book.

The arguments and the empirical data contained within Small Worlds have been of obvious relevance to more than just specialists in Canadian politics, and have provided empirical proof of how sub-state polities can generate and sustain separate political cultures, serving as ‘small worlds’ for citizens. Since it was originally published, the political terrain has changed in Canada and elsewhere. Regions now wield greater authority than they did in the 1970s (Keating, 1998; Loughlin, 2001; Bache and Flinders, 2004). Indeed, as one index of regional authority in 42 mainly Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) states makes clear, between 1970 and 2005 only two states became more centralized while almost three-quarters saw regional powers increase (Hooghe et al., 2008). In addition, social welfare provisions, which, in the post-war period, helped to build and sustain a sense of state-wide solidarity, are no longer untouchable elements of policy and, particularly in the 1980s, were radically altered in some states. The strengthening of regional government and the supposed erosion of expectations of state-wide policy uniformity provide very practical motivations to re-examine evidence of regions as ‘small worlds’.

Academic debates about the importance of states and the relative importance of regions have also developed considerably since 1980 and now include discussions about the nature and impact of multi-level government, cultural pluralism and multi-cultural conceptions of citizenship. In some cases this has been prompted by changes evident in Canada and elsewhere in terms of increased immigration, official policies of multiculturalism, or the ebb and flow of support for nationalist movements and self-determination. Each of these is tied to diversity within the state and how it might be accommodated. One might rightly ask, therefore, whether the arguments made in Small Worlds still help us to understand the significance of regions, whether new empirical data might prompt us to refine the original conclusions or whether new frames of analysis help us to ask and answer new questions about regions as ‘small worlds’.

The contributions in this collection raise two questions of relevance to political scientists, each addressed explicitly or implicitly in Small Worlds. How meaningful are regions? And, more implicitly, how united need a polity be in order for it to function well? This introduction addresses each of these in turn before discussing the contributions to this collection.

How Meaningful are Regions?

Regions come in many forms and we can distinguish them by territorial scale and composition. This collection focuses on regions that exist at the meso-level, between the state and the municipal or local level. This leaves aside the obvious alternative definition of regions as supra-state entities (Russett, 1968; Inglehart and Carballo, 1997; Caramani and Wagemann, 2005). Elkins and Simeon examined two types of sub-state regions distinguished by their composition: the constituent units of federations, such as a Canadian province, US state, German Land or devolved jurisdiction in the UK, and those defined by shared demographic or economic characteristics, such as French Canada, or Atlantic Canada. Such a distinction allows us to compare the potential impact of different types of sub-state regions. Are political boundaries necessary for regions to exert an impact on political attitudes and behaviours? Do the functional cleavages underpinning federalism, such as religion or language, prompt a centrifugal divergence that then operates on a territorial scale? Literature on political culture from the USA is clear that jurisdictional boundaries are not necessary for marked variations in attitudes and behaviours to appear. Elazar’s (1966) identification of three political cultures in the USA, created by distinct patterns of migration and westward expansion, has prompted a considerable body of work that tests, empirically, the sources and consequences of cultural variations within (Alm et al., 2001) and across state lines (Schlitz and Rainey, 1978; Erikson et al., 1987; Garreau, 1981; Lieske, 1993; Weakliem and Biggert, 1999; Moon et al., 2001; Alm et al., 2004). We see similar findings elsewhere, from Linz and de Miguel’s (1966) research on the ‘eight Spains’ to more recent efforts (Curtice, 1988, 1992; Henderson, 2004, 2009). Together this body of work provides compelling evidence of regional variations in attitudes and behaviour, and confirms that for regions to be politically salient they need not necessarily conform to intrastate boundaries. There are two possible explanations for this.

First, it is possible that the political salience of regions stems not from the regions themselves, but from the demographic variation that exists across them. This is what we might consider to be the compositional effect of regions. Here we would expect an individual-level relationship between particular demographic characteristics and certain attitudes and behaviours. Union members backing a left-wing party would be one example. If such demographic characteristics are clustered in space, then the result can be a territorial region with distinct attributes. Alternatively, demographic variation can create a unique context that exerts an independent impact on attitudes and behaviours. Here, we would not require an individual-level relationship between certain demographic characteristics and certain behaviours but rather an aggregate, contextual relationship. More conservative attitudes in a region once populated by United Empire Loyalists (Bell, 1970; Bell and Tepperman, 1979; Lipset, 1968) would be one example.

For other researchers, only sub-state polities are capable of generating the distinct political cultures that drive, or are characterized by, regional variations in attitudes and behaviours. Socialization through a regionally controlled education system or distinct policies created by a sub-state government have the capacity to instil in residents unique expectations about government, although one might rightly wonder whether unique policies lead to different expectations about government, or whether distinct expectations prompt the call for and creation of policies deemed appropriate for a regional reality. According to Breton (1964), the socializing effect of sub-state polities increases with the level of institutional completeness. A region-specific media, publishing in a regional language, reporting on the workings of a regional government, creates a regional reference to political life and raises the likelihood of generating regional-specific approaches to politics and policy, citizenship and community membership. An institutionally complete region serves as a considerable buffer to the powerful socializing influence of the state. Breton’s (1964) view of institutional completeness suggests that regions can have resources, not in the sense of material wealth, but in institutions that can sustain a sense of distinctiveness. By controlling the rules of political engagement, or by controlling policy creation in particular areas of jurisdiction, regional governments can create a unique political environment that prompts specific expectations about government performance and policy delivery, support for an active or a small state, inclusive or exclusive notion of citizenship or community belonging. This would be an example of a direct effect and has found considerable support in the literature. This distinction between regions as polities and regions as territorially-based clusters of particular demographic traits is, of course, somewhat artificial. We can also see hybrid forms of influence, where both political boundaries and demographic traits contribute to a distinct political culture, as well as nested regions, where clusters of sub-state polities, such as the former East German Länder, might contribute to regional variation that is influenced by other types of boundaries.

Writing about national identity, Cohen (1996) argues that individuals understand their own reality through the lens of their own particular circumstances. Someone from Windsor and someone from Iqaluit might have very different understandings of what it means to be Canadian, just as a Muslim voter in Glasgow and an Anglican voter in Colchester might have different views of what it means to be British. Although Cohen was interested in personal characteristics, such as gender or religion, and how individuals navigate belonging in a larger community, it would be easy to see how regions could play a similar role, affecting understandings of the state, how it operates and what it offers. This would be an example of an indirect effect. Individuals, living in different constituent units of a federal or decentralized state, might form opinions of the state and politics in general that bear the mark of their regions of residence.

How Much ‘National’ Unity is Required for a Polity to Function Well?

Small Worlds appeared at a time when preoccupation with ‘national’ unity was particularly high among English Canadian academics. The assumption in the term ‘national’ unity, is that the state is the appropriate territorial scale for unity to occur, that the state will contain one nation. National unity and state unity are therefore assumed to be synonymous. It is a term applied awkwardly to multinational states such as Spain, the UK and Canada.

What might have appeared to be a particularly Canadian preoccupation is, of course, part of a wider phenomenon about the ability of states to wield authority and compel attachment or solidarity. Research on citizenship can be divided between that which emphasizes membership in a community or that which focuses on rights, but both have tended to view the state as a natural territorial unit, providing for citizens and binding them together (Kymlicka and Norman, 1994). Attachment to the state, and a sense of solidarity to fellow citizens within the state, has in the past been seen as essential for democratic stability. Indeed for Almond and Verba, identification with the state was considered to be a key component of democratic stability, and attachments to other groups, whether religious or ethnic communities or sub-state polities, was considered to be a risk factor for unity (Almond and Verba, 1963). Such claims now sit uneasily with the literature on national pluralism, which argues that a recognition of different national identities is essential in normative terms for fundamental justice and in practical terms for the integrity of the state (Kymlicka, 1995; Tierney, 2004; Requejo, 2005) and indeed seem distant from the considerable body of work that chronicles regional variations within states such as Canada, the USA and the UK, none of which argues that the integrity of the state is in peril if residents in Alberta, Vermont or Wales hold different expectations of government from their neighbours in Saskatchewan, New Hampshire or England.

While regionally-based diversity of attitudes and behaviours might not in itself pose a risk for state stability, other features of the contemporary polity might well be affected. The sense of state-wide solidarity that underpins post-war redistributive welfare regimes, if replaced by greater attachments to regions rather than the state, has obvious consequences for the continued operation of features such as fiscal federalism (Banting and Corbett, 2002; Banting and Broadway, 2004; Banting, 2005). The fear, of course, is that in the absence of some form of state-wide solidarity, other seemingly essential political behaviours—such as voting—might fail to materialize, along with all the attendant benefits that this brings to the polity for policy creation and for individual civic development.

Strong regions can also complicate the way individuals navigate their political surroundings. In a multi-level context, strong regions can make it difficult for citizens to determine who they should hold accountable for policy successes or failures (Cutler, 2004). The casualty here is not state unity, but the ability of voters to discharge their duties as citizens and the risk, of course, is that confusion might lead to exit from the electoral process, prompting a democratic crisis that is one step removed from that originally feared by Almond and Verba (1963). And yet what might appear as a catastrophe for some is merely an opportunity for others. Varying access to certain policy entitlements—such as free university tuition—can be portrayed either as a potential violation of rights or justice, or as the inevitable and unsurprising consequence of a decentralized political system in which jurisdiction is divided across layers of government. Regional political parties, particularly those advocating greater powers for regions, can be seen as a symbol of decreased state-wide sentiment or vehicles of regional political expression that reflect one of the multiple communities to which individuals feel they belong. Strong regions, and regional variation within states, can be seen as a challenge or as a source of strength.

Revisiting Small Worlds

The contributions in this collection perform two tasks. First, they revisit the original arguments in Small Worlds and, using new data, determine whether we can advance or update the original claims made by the authors. Second, some of the pieces use Small Worlds as a point of departure, pursuing lines of research suggested either implicitly or explicitly by the original work.

In his article on attitudes to policy provision, Cameron Anderson revisits the arguments and data contained in chapter three of Small Worlds and tests whether regional differences are still present, whether they outweigh other cleavages as a source of differentiation, and whether we might conclude that regions are divergi...