Citizenship after the Nation State

Regionalism, Nationalism and Public Attitudes in Europe

Charlie Jeffery, Daniel Wincott, A. Henderson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230296572
• eBook ISBN: 9781137314994
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Offering an confrontation of the uncritical choice of the 'nation-state' as a unit of analysis in postwar social science, this book utilises specially collected data from 14 regions across five European states to explores how citizens define and pursue collective goals at regional scale as well as at the scale of the 'nation-state'.

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Introduction: Regional Public Attitudes beyond Methodological Nationalism

Charlie Jeffery

This book confronts one of the problematic features of postwar social science: its often unreflected choice of the nation-state as a unit of analysis. We do so by looking within the state, using a regional-scale unit of analysis. We explore the extent to which citizens define and pursue collective goals at regional scales and through regional institutions as well as at the scale of the nation-state. We do this on the basis of a unique dataset which records how citizens in 14 European regions balance opportunities to pursue those collective goals at state-wide and regional scales. That dataset is the product of a research project entitled Citizenship after the Nation-State (CANS), which was funded under the coordination of the European Science Foundation. This chapter sets out the research design of the CANS project and presents an initial overview of the data designed to put in context the chapters that follow. It starts with a methodological and theoretical discussion of why the research was necessary and why nothing like it has been done before.

1.1 The problem of methodological nationalism

The assumption that the nation-state is the obvious focus for social science analysis has been dubbed ‘methodological nationalism’ (cf., Martins 1974; Chernilo 2006; Jeffery and Wincott 2010). That assumption has come under powerful challenge over the last decade, especially from those working on trans-nationalism: in the advocacy of a new ‘cosmopolitanism’ by leading sociologists (e.g., Beck 2002); in anthropological work on migration (e.g., Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003); in international relations work on globalization (e.g., Scholte 2005); and (though with different terminology) in public law work on the emergence of new patterns of sovereignty that either transcend the nation-state or operate at the interstices of the various territorial scales at which public authority is organized (e.g., Walker 2008).

Some of those territorial scales of public authority are smaller than and often contained within the nation-state, although the critique of ‘methodological nationalism’ has hitherto focused rather less on developments within the state than on those beyond it. But there is compelling evidence that sub-state, or regional,¹ scales have become much more important as a locus for social and political life over the last 30–40 years. In some fields of social science that growing importance has been amply reflected in research. Work on the sub-state region as a unit of analysis is widespread in human geography and spatial economics, driven on by a number of seminal contributions (e.g., Ohmae 1993; Storper 1995; Amin and Thrift 1995), and captured in a terminology of a (now not so) ‘new’ regionalism which has launched its own factional disputes (e.g., Lovering 1999; Wren 2009) carried out in bespoke journals, including Regional Studies and Spatial Economic Analysis. There is no dispute, though, that the region is important as a scale for social mobilization, economic activity and public policy.

The importance of the region is less well established in political science, despite growing empirical evidence of the importance of the regional scale in the practice of politics. Compared with 30 years ago, there are now many more regional decision-making authorities in advanced democracies exercising a widening range of policy responsibilities, producing widening inter-regional policy variations, and contested by a growing number of region-only (that is, non-state-wide) political parties (see, e.g., Hooghe, Marks and Schakel 2008; Moreno and McEwen 2005; Jeffery 2011). Regionalization has meant that important policy fields like health, education, environment, regional economic policy and, in some cases, policing and taxation, are now responsibilities of regional institutions. Regions now matter much more directly to voters, parties and interest groups. Winning control of – or good access to – regional government is in many places a significant and growing prize.

At first glance it may appear surprising that the accumulation of evidence on the importance of regional-scale politics has not yet produced a ‘breakthrough’ into the mainstream of political science. We have discussed elsewhere (Jeffery 2011; Jeffery and Wincott 2010) some of the reasons for this. Foremost appears to be the continuing resonance of theories of modernization that were seminal for key fields of postwar political science – in particular in the study of party competition and the welfare state.

These theories of modernization – notably as presented by Stein Rokkan (1999) and T.H. Marshall (1992 [1950]) – offered powerful accounts of how over the preceding centuries political communities, institutions and policies became increasingly integrated and consolidated on a single spatial scale, that of the nation-state. Convergent processes of nation-building and state formation became understood (more in successor analysis than by Rokkan and Marshall themselves) as the inevitable culmination of a path of progress extending over centuries. As Martins (1974, p. 276) put it in an early critique, the nation-state was seen as ‘the terminal unit and boundary condition for the demarcation of problems and phenomena for social science’. A consequence of this focus on the nation-state was that phenomena which were not clearly evident or obviously significant at that scale could remain ‘hidden from view’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, p. 302). Michael Keating made the same point more directly in his analysis of the impact of modernization theories on our knowledge of regional-scale politics (1998, p. ix): ‘territorial effects have been a constant presence in European politics, but ... too often social scientists have simply not looked for them, or defined them out of existence where they conflicted with successive modernization paradigms.’

Jeffery and Wincott (2010, pp. 174–178) identified three ways in which conventional work has disguised or downplayed these ‘territorial effects’. The first concerns issues where regional ‘effects’ are actually deemed significant enough to look for. However, the ‘methodological-nationalist’ assumptions brought to the analysis of those issues can easily overwhelm them by skewing the analytical perspective, or trivialize them by presenting them as consequences of state-scale agency. One telling example is work on regional distinctiveness in voting behaviour. This was a preoccupation of Stein Rokkan and his colleagues. Their assumption was that despite modernization and ‘progress’ there should still be evidence of an unresolved centre-periphery cleavage in post war (Western) European politics, an assumption seemingly supported by a small number of highly influential contributions like those of Michael Hechter (1975) on sub-state nationalism in the United Kingdom, and of Karl Rohe (1992) on the territorial impacts of religious affiliation in shaping regional political cultures in Germany. But the Rokkanians searched in vain – ‘electorally, contemporary peripheral mobilisation has not been very successful’ (Rokkan and Urwin 1982, p. 165) – as did others then and later, looking for evidence of significant or growing regional differentiation in voting behaviour in state-wide elections (Rose and Urwin 1975, p. 42; Urwin 1982, p. 431; Hearl, Budge and Peterson 1996; Caramani 2004). As Daniele Caramani (2004, p. 291) put it in his acclaimed study, The Nationalization of Politics:

Even though there has been a strong trend to institutional decentralization in all countries, new federal structures did not lead to the regionalization of voting behaviour in the last few decades ... the period since World War II has witnessed a fundamental stability of the territorial configurations of the vote in Europe.

That finding is perfectly well founded. There is – as others more sympathetic to a ‘de-nationalized’ perspective have confirmed (e.g., Deschouwer 2008) – little evidence of growing regionalization of voting behaviour in state-wide elections.

But are state-wide elections the most logical place to search for evidence of regionalized voting behaviour? Exploring what voters do in regional elections, compared to what they do in state-wide elections, might seem a more promising route to reveal any regional differentiation in voting behaviour. And given the mushrooming of elected regional institutions over the last few decades, there are now many cases in which this proposition might be explored. However – until very recently – most research on regional elections has defined them as ‘second-order’ (Reif and Schmitt 1980), subordinate to state-scale politics, with their outcomes explained by state-scale factors (for an overview, see Hough and Jeffery 2006a). Much more rarely is there a concern to identify and explore regional-scale agency: whether, and if so why, regional voters may make decisions in regional elections which have a regional-scale logic unrelated to (or perhaps even with causal impacts on) state-scale politics.

Where such a concern has been used to define research questions other possibilities emerge (cf., Jeffery 2011: for example, strong regional identities can imbue regional elections with a distinctive, de-nationalized logic, even if (as Caramani found) these identity effects become muted in state-wide elections in the same regions (e.g., Wyn Jones and Scully 2006); or the things regional institutions do – the responsibilities they have for particular policy fields, the competence of regional governments and their leaders – can also uncouple regional elections from the issues and dynamics of state-wide politics (e.g., Atkeson and Partin 1995; Cutler 2008).

These examples show how easy it is to overlook political phenomena by looking for them in the wrong places (i.e., state-wide election results) or through a skewed analytical prism (i.e., ideas on second-order elections). Research findings can be heavily path-dependent on the way research questions are formulated. If other starting points are taken which identify regional elections as the unit of analysis for exploring regional voting behaviour, and which treat regional elections on their own terms rather than as functions of national elections, a different or at least more nuanced picture begins to emerge.

A second way in which regional ‘effects’ may be hidden from view has to do with the often unthinking assumption in the terminology of nation-state; that nation (a form of political community) and state (a form of collective political organization) are territorially coterminous. This assumption persists despite obvious evidence that nation-building within particular state boundaries was in many cases an uncompleted process (e.g., in Spain) and in others never a coherent aspiration (e.g., in the United Kingdom). The assumption of nation and state being coterminous, and its association with a modernization discourse of completion and ‘progress’, has often been a platform for normative claims for state-wide uniformity of public policy outcomes. This tendency has been especially strong in the literature on welfare statehood and is bound up with the assumption that a ‘national’ community is one in which citizens most appropriately express solidarity with one another. Where regional political communities aspire to policy goals different to those that adhere to state-wide understandings of policy goals, the regionalized perspective is often portrayed as damaging or regressive, undermining social solidarity, rather than as an alternative outcome based on legitimately aggregated voter preferences.

For example, it has been argued that because devolved governments in the United Kingdom now make distinctive policy choices in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the devolution process ‘threatens the Welfare State’ by marking the end of ‘the belief that a benign government at Westminster can secure the distribution of benefits and burdens on the basis not of geography but need’ (Bogdanor 2001, pp. 153–154). Similarly, work on the United States and Canada has argued that regional differentiation of policy goals runs the risk of a ‘race to the bottom’ as regions compete on (lowering) welfare standards to attract inward investment (e.g., Peterson 1995; Harrison 2006). The consequence – ‘obviously’ according to Braun (2000, p. 15, my emphasis) – is that fields such as ‘social policy and health policy are areas which require a high degree of standardisation and harmonisation’ at state-wide scales. Banting and Corbett (2002, p. 19) push the point further by tugging on heartstrings in the rhetorical question: ‘Does a sick baby in one region have access to the same level of care on similar terms and conditions as a sick baby in another region of the same country?’ We are left in no doubt as to what our answer should be: All citizens in the same state – including sick babies –should have uniform services provided by the state.

But there are alternative answers. A region might conceivably decide to do more than its neighbour for sick babies, or older people, or students on the basis of a political programme legitimized through regional-scale electoral competition. There is evidence that regional governments may seek to enhance welfare standards rather than be drawn into a damaging, downward spiral of inter-regional competition (e.g., Keating 2009, pp. 506–510). There is also evidence that regional-scale innovations in enhancing welfare standards may lead to emulation elsewhere within the state (Adams and Schmuecker 2005, pp. 48–49), opening up the possibility of an inter-regional ‘race to the top’. The broader point is, as Keating (2009, p. 504) put it:

It is a mistake to believe that if social solidarity weakens at the level of the ‘nation-state’, this always and necessarily represents an absolute decline in solidarity. Such an assumption reflects the common unthinking acceptance of the coupling of nation and state and of the nation-state as the ‘normal’ or unchallengeable framework for public action.

But a third reason for regional ‘effects’ – like differential voting behaviour, or policy variation – remaining ‘hidden from view’ is precisely because social scientists still largely have an ‘unthinking’ preoccupation with the nation-state as an ‘unchallengeable framework for public action’. Because of that preoccupation we have accumulated an outstanding evidence base about collective p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction: Regional Public Attitudes beyond Methodological Nationalism
• 2 Citizenship after Devolution in the United Kingdom: Public Attitudes in Scotland and Wales
• 3 A Comparative Study of Citizenship in Three Spanish Autonomous Communities
• 4 Regional Citizenship in Germany: Solidarity and Participation in a Unitary Federal State
• 5 Public Attitudes to National and Regional Citizenship in a Unitary Federal State: The Case of Austria
• 6 Regional Citizenship and Scales of Governance in France
• 7 Citizenship in Europe: A Comparative Examination of the Territorial Scales of Political Life
• 8 Conclusion: Citizenship After the Nation State: The 2009 Survey and Beyond
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index