3
aspiring to govern the state, a difficult task when some territorial identities have been
forged in opposition to the central state.
To some extent the problems posed by multi-level politics are universal. All
statewide parties in decentralized states will have to accommodate interterritorial tensions
over the distribution of resources, manage the relationship between party officials and
representatives at various tiers of government, and speak for the ‘general’ interest whilst
simultaneously representing potentially contradictory ‘particularistic’ interests. But these
contradictions are likely to be much stronger in heterogeneous societies where strong
ethnoregionalist parties (De Winter and Tursan 1998) are present. Ethnoregionalist
parties will inevitably challenge statewide parties’ ethnoregionalist ‘credentials’, and seek
to portray the regional representatives of the statewide parties as puppets of the national
leadership. We should therefore expect the dilemmas of party adaptation to multi-level
electoral politics to be particularly visible in cases such as Spain and the United
Kingdom, where decentralizing institutional reform was a response to the growth of
ethnoregionalist movements.
We have found it particularly useful to focus on three arenas of party activity
where statewide parties have to address the tensions and contradictions emerging from
multi-level electoral politics (see also Hopkin 2003). The rest of this section outlines the
kinds of changes that can be expected in these three arenas as statewide parties adapt to
the creation or strengthening of sub-central political institutions. This three-fold
distinction will then inform our analysis of the comparative empirical evidence.
Convention