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The Party Politics of Decentralization: Theory, Definitions, Research Design, and Methods

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The Party Politics of Decentralization

Part of the book series: Comparative Territorial Politics ((COMPTPOL))

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Abstract

In this chapter, the author introduces the main research questions addressed by the volume, framed within the existing literature, and a summary of the study’s main concepts and terminological choices to define and narrow its objective. The chapter devotes itself to the measurement of party strategies based on a coding scheme devised for the content analysis of party manifestos. It also describes the research design adopted and the advantages (as well as the limits) of the case study. The last section outlines the integrated theoretical model adopted in this study to analyze party strategies on decentralization.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Similarly, Toubeau and Massetti (2013, 301) argue that “the party politics of territorial reforms refers to the way in which statewide parties and regionalist parties position themselves and strategize on the territorial dimension during their competitive interactions, and to the way in which this process of interaction affects the substance of territorial reforms.”

  2. 2.

    An earlier version of this section, based on manifesto data from 1963 to 2013, appeared in Basile (2016).

  3. 3.

    The electoral manifestos of political parties have been established as useful instruments for providing information concerning party stances on specific issues. Among the advantages they offer: they are all delivered in the same period, ensuring consistency of data for all the parties included in the analysis; they represent a somewhat official source; and they are present in all democratic countries, thus paving the way for future cross-national comparisons. Of course, manifestos show the “official” positions adopted by parties for general elections, while they fail to capture the intraparty divisions. For a good synthesis of the debate on the use of manifestos, including their advantages and shortcomings, see Ruedin and Morales (2017, 2).

  4. 4.

    This coding scheme follows the general rules for the division of documents into quasi-sentences laid out by the CMP group (Volkens 2001). The QS should be a unit of significance by itself: once a statement has been split, it should still be understandable and express a meaningful concept.

  5. 5.

    For a complete list of the coded documents, see the appendix to this volume.

  6. 6.

    Short for Territorial Issues Dataset.

  7. 7.

    The coded documents usually refer to party manifestos . In some cases, however, parties did not issue manifestos on their own; in these cases, the coalition manifesto has been coded. In other cases, both the single party and the coalition manifestos were coded. However, in those cases, at least for some analyses, only one document (usually the coalition manifesto) was considered. Information about the use of party vs. coalition manifestos is included in the appendix, and they are specified, when relevant, in the analyses.

  8. 8.

    The CMP categories measuring the territorial dimension are Per301 and Per302. For their definitions, consult Codebook version 2017a, available at https://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/datasets (last accessed on October 17, 2017).

  9. 9.

    In some cases, the TERRISS Dataset used original manifestos that were retrieved directly by the author from the archives of political parties or libraries and were thus coded for the first time.

  10. 10.

    The number of statements dealing with territorial issues has been derived by comparing the percentages provided by variables Per301 and Per302 with the variable accounting for the total number of QSs coded in the entire document. The numbers thus obtained have been used according to the same formula to calculate directional certainty .

  11. 11.

    The lower n for this correlation is due to the higher number of documents with no statements coded as territorial in the CMP compared to the TERRISS Dataset .

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  1. University of Siena, Siena, Italy

    Linda Basile

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Basile, L. (2019). The Party Politics of Decentralization: Theory, Definitions, Research Design, and Methods. In: The Party Politics of Decentralization. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75853-4_1

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