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strains for parties and has a significant impact on party competition and government
formation at the statewide level.
Devolution and Party Adaptation: Three Arenas of Party Change
Multi-level electoral politics inevitably creates complications for statewide
political parties which aspire to winning power at the national level. Decentralized
political systems ‘create additional territorial-based citizen-agent relationships’
(Lancaster 1999: 64), meaning that statewide parties are obliged to interact with their
voters in a variety of different ways: as ‘national’ parties seeking to run the government
of the state, as local parties seeking power at the municipal level, and as ‘regional’ parties
seeking to govern a particular territory or nation within the state.
The difficulty of the dilemmas this poses will depend on the degree to which
diverse identities co-exist within the state. In relatively ethnically homogeneous states,
decentralized and even strongly federal government may coexist with a high level of
‘nationalization’ (Caramani 1996) of the party system (Germany, Austria, and Australia
for example). In such cases, statewide parties do not have to represent conflicting ethnic
or regional identities within a single organization, and may be able to maintain internal
cohesion at relatively little cost. In contrast, ethnically heterogeneous states often choose
to decentralize power precisely because of the difficulties in representing conflicting
identities through uniform institutional structures (for example in Belgium, Spain or the
United Kingdom). Here statewide parties need to accommodate territorial diversity whilst
Convention