Substate nationalists and European integration : friends, foes, or something in between?

This thesis analyzes the relationship between substate nationalist parties with the European Union and their support for European integration. Building off the political psychology literature on elite cues and mass beliefs, the analysis will utilize party manifestos for European Parliament elections from 1979 until 2014. Indicator variables for decentralization, support for European integration, and opposition to European integration are contained in the Euromanifesto Studies dataset and will be the variables utilized in the time series regression analysis. The first section of this thesis will introduce substate nationalist parties in their complexity, along with the conclusions reached about the family of substate nationalists by the established literature. The second section will discuss the data and methodology. The third section will present and discuss the results from the regression analysis. Finally, the fourth section will conclude with a more in-depth discussion of the regression analysis results and implications for the field going forward. It will be shown that substate nationalist parties are not supportive of European integration as the literature claims them to be.Arts, Faculty ofPolitical Science, Department ofGraduat