The Tides of Nationalism: Accounting for the Successes and Failures of Regional-Nationalist Political Parties and Coalitions in Catalonia and Galicia, Spain
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2013
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Haverford College. Department of Political Science
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Thesis
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The Herman M. Somers Prize in Political Science
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eng
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Haverford users only until 2091-01-01, afterwards Open Access.
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Abstract
In this thesis, I attempted to account for why regional nationalist political parties have consistently won elections in Catalonia (one of Spain’s autonomous communities), achieving majorities in the Catalan parliament, while similar parties in the autonomous community of Galicia have never earned more than a quarter of the region’s parliamentary seats. These two regions each have a minority language spoken alongside Spanish, and while very similar on paper, produce vastly divergent electoral results. In trying to account for these results, I examined six different variables--socioeconomic history, electoral systems and structures, party strategies and leadership, political culture, state‐level factors, and suprastate‐level factors--showing how they all have continuously provided an advantage to Catalan nationalist parties, an advantage not provided to their Galician counterparts. I also explored how these variables shaped the tone and character of regional nationalist party discourses, explaining why the Catalan nationalist movement has taken an increasingly secessionist turn, while the Galician movement has not. The centerpiece of my research for this thesis was a two‐week trip to Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela, Spain (generously funded by Haverford’s Center for Peace and Global Citizenship) during which I interviewed several high‐level politicians, academics, and activists who work with and study the issues central to my thesis. I supplemented these interviews with existing texts and studies of regional nationalist politics and autonomous elections in Spain, as well as my own quantitative analysis of Spain’s electoral systems. While this thesis just examined the cases of Catalonia and Galicia, the conclusions are much more broadly applicable, and can help lead to a greater understanding of Spanish autonomous (regional) politics, and regional nationalist politics in general.