Nationalist parties are the product of different cleavages in the political structuring of European party systems across time and space. Cleavage theory posits that European party systems were formed by the sequential appearance of major conflicts arising from the National and Industrial Revolutions (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Bornschier 2009; Caramani 2015). The original model elaborated by Lipset and Rokkan defines four historical cleavages. One of the oldest cleavages in European politics, the center-periphery cleavage emerging from the so-called National Revolution, has a territorial-cultural nature.1 According to Lipset and Rokkan, the center-periphery cleavage was triggered by ‘the conflict between the central nation-building culture and the increasing resistance of the ethnically, linguistically, or religiously distinct subject populations in the provinces and the peripheries’ (Lipset and Rokkan 1967: 101; Alonso 2012; Caramani 2015; Bornschier 2009, 2010). Party systems froze the cleavage in long-standing political alignments with the result of a fragmented map of minority nationalist parties across some European party systems (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Urwin 1983). From the 1970s onward, the erosion of the old cleavages that structured party systems and voting orientations led to the transformation of political conflicts (Dalton 1996; Kriesi et al. 2006, 2008). This erosion paved the way not only to the revival of the ethnoterritorial cleavage but also the emergence of new cleavages in Europe. For some authors (Bornschier 2010), the new cleavage pits left libertarian values with traditional authoritarian ones. Kriesi et al. (2008) define the new cleavage ‘demarcation’ along socioeconomic and cultural dimensions separating the winners and losers of globalization. European integration becomes ‘part and parcel’ of the new cleavage (Lachat 2008: 290). The rise of populist nationalist parties is considered the product of a new structural cleavage in European politics, a conflict between integration and demarcation. This new conflict is structurally based on economic competition (liberalization and market integration) and cultural competition (immigration and multicultural issues) (Kriesi et al. 2006, 2008, 2012; Bornschier 2010). Here nationalism, whether defined as essential nationalism or nativism , provides the ideological framework for economic and cultural defense and the politicization of collective national identities vis-à-vis the breakdown of national barriers (Kriesi et al. 2006, 2008).
The concept of party families implies the existence of cross-national and cross-temporal similarities among political parties beyond national party systems (Mair and Mudde 1998). The concept is particularly well-suited to analyze political parties cross-nationally and that explains its academic success in the analysis of the European political system (Marks et al. 2002; Marks and Wilson 2000). Applying the conceptual contours of party families proposed by Mair and Mudde (1998), the definition of party family adopted here builds upon the combined criteria of origins and ideology for two nationalist party families minority and populist, that have evolved in distinctive and heterogeneous ways in comparison with mainstream party families in Europe. The appropriateness of the term ‘party family’ to classify these parties was earlier questioned on the grounds of their ideological heterogeneity (Mair and Mudde 1998: 222). Nationalist parties are often considered as ‘strange bedfellows’ and heterogeneous according to different criteria but despite their internal heterogeneity , the literature increasingly treats them as single units (De Winter and Türsan 1998; Kitschelt 1995; Carter 2005; Müdde 2007).2 The conceptualizations of both nationalist party families share similar problems: the internal differentiation of the party families and the identification of their members. Including and excluding parties as members of minority and populist nationalist parties have consequences for the appropriate assessment of the size of party families at the European level and its implications for the availability of political parties for transnational party coordination .
Early works on minority parties in Western Europe highlighting their heterogeneous nature appeared in the 1980s (Urwin 1983). The minority nationalist party family is analyzed as such in the first systematic comparative work on these parties in Europe (De Winter and Türsan 1998). Türsan argues that these parties share a specific stand for the empowering of their ‘ethnoregional groups they claim to represent’ (Türsan 1998: 5). These parties endorse a nationalism based on ethnic distinctiveness and territorial claims within established European states (Türsan 1998: 5). The question of membership in this party family has been debated, since different types of parties and labels (ethnic parties and non-state-wide parties) are sometimes used interchangeably. Ethnic parties do not exhibit the territorial dimension required by the definition.3 Non-state-wide parties are characterized by the scale of their politics, not for the presence of territorial demands of recognition.4
Different labels of the party family are interchangeably used—regionalist, ethnoregionalist, ethnoterritorial, autonomist, minority nationalist, among others (Türsan 1998: 5, De Winter, Gómez-Reino and Lynch, 2006; De Winter, Gómez-Reino and Buelens, 2006a; Gómez-Reino 2014; De Winter et al. 2017).
The party family exhibits an ideological heterogeneity on two accounts. First, parties differ in their territorial demands in significant ways, ranging from protectionism to secession (De Winter 1998; Dandoy 2010; Tronconi 2009; Hepburn 2010). Second and more importantly, they exhibit fundamentally different proximate ideologies and endorse different economic and social policies (Urwin 1983; Erk 2010; Schakel and Massetti 2015).5 The dominant dimension of political contestation for these parties is the cultural and identity based on the center-periphery dimension. However, the ideology of these parties is not unidimensional (De Winter et al. 2006a, b; Alonso 2012). They appear in a multidimensional policy space in which minority nationalists compete: a secondary left-right dimension (Erk 2010; Massetti and Schakel 2015), European dimension (Massetti 2009) and new politics (De Winter 1998; Van Atta 2003). The connection between the dimensions and the relative salience of the different dimensions is a matter of empirical research (Elias et al. 2015).
Several works in the literature analyze their different positions along the left-right dimension of minority nationalist parties (De Winter 1998; Massetti 2009; Alonso et al. 2015; Elias et al. 2015; Massetti and Schakel 2015). The dominant center-periphery dimension of contestation is linked to a multilayered ideological configuration in which th...