Explaining territorial demands: party competition as a driver of self-government claims in decentralised stateless nations

The first wave of stateless nationalist mobilisation triggered decentralisation processes in several Western European states. Political autonomy provided European stateless nations with sub-state institutions with significant competences to manage their own affairs. Multinational federalism scholars have long debated whether political decentralisation to accommodate stateless nations appeases demands for secession or rather exacerbates them. Autonomous institutions created a new sub-state political system which political entrepreneurs, most significantly Stateless Nationalist and Regionalist Parties, are able to exploit to put forward demands for further empowerment of sub-state institutions. In the last decade territorial demands have been progressively raised by political parties in some Western European stateless nations, thus casting doubt on the effectiveness of political decentralisation as a valid mechanism to prevent secession. Scotland voted on independence on September 2014 whereas Catalan nationalist parties have been attempting to hold their own referendum since 2013. By looking specifically at the effects of political party competition at the sub-state level, this research aims at providing an explanation for the dynamics of territorial demands that have led to a high saliency of the territorial question in many Western European multinational states. An in-depth qualitative analysis of party competition in Catalonia aims to provide a successful explanation for the escalation of territorial demands in that country, also taking into account the role played by central institutions and the increasing support that secession shown amongst the population. The Catalan case is compared to Flanders and Scotland to test whether the dynamics of party competition can tell us a bit more about the ongoing territorial demands put forward by political parties in these three countries. The territorial accommodation of multinational states have tended to be analysed from an institutionalist perspective whereas multi-level party competition has kept a blind eye on constitutional change. This research aims at contributing to the growing literature of sub-state party politics and its capacities to explain constitutional change processes