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Abstract
This article studies political participation in the context of decentralisation in Europe. Recent secession attempts demonstrate how the demand for decentralisation energises citizens. Yet the fact that decentralised institutions, initially, were endorsed to increase citizens’ participation is often neglected. In order to test this contention empirically, three theoretically informed arguments are developed, making use of the most recent data on regional authority for 282 regions in 20 European countries. Results of three-level hierarchical models lend support to the arguments. Regional self-rule increases probabilities to engage only in more demanding and less common forms of participation. It also acts as a political opportunity structure, moderating the influence of individual driving forces of participation. Participatory effects on protest activity, however, turn out to be endogenous, as the instrumental variable analysis indicates that decentralisation does not increase protest, but rather the reverse. These findings seem relevant to the current heated debates both on secession attempts and waning political involvement.
Acknowledgements
An early version of this paper was presented at the 2015 DVPW conference, Comparative Politics section, Hamburg, 27 February 2015. I thank all panel participants at that conference, Kathrin Ackermann, Marc Danneberg, Alena Kerscher, Tobias Schwarzbözl, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and helpful suggestions. I thank Julia Renner, Alexandra Ugrai, and Johannes Gansmeier for their help in preparing the manuscript.
Notes
1. This distinction parallels the discussion of instrumental and educative effects of direct democratic institutions (see Smith and Tolbert Citation2007).
2. Applying factor analysis, Hooghe et al. (Citation2010: 9) show that self-rule and shared-rule are empirically distinct phenomena, lending support to the position that aspects of decentralisation should be analysed separately, and not jointly as in previous studies.
3. It might be argued that shared-rule, too, matters for participation as it could affect the role of elected representatives. Besides our belief that an influence of self-rule is more persuasive, very little variation of shared-rule between regions and countries has been found. Nevertheless, I am happy to share additional analyses of shared-rule on request.
4. This effect of institutions, being the rules of the political game, is not only central to new institutionalism (Aspinwall and Schneider Citation2000; Hall and Taylor Citation1996), but also well acknowledged within political behaviour research (Sniderman and Levendusky Citation2007). Electoral rules, for instance, are usually considered such an important explanatory factor for voting (Karp and Banducci Citation2007). Similarly, direct democratic institutions are found to influence protest behaviour (Fatke and Freitag Citation2013).
5. The argument for decentralised institutions is paralleled to the educative effects of direct democracy (see Smith and Tolbert Citation2004).
6. Data on regional authority are available from the website of Gary Marks: http://www.unc.edu/~gwmarks/data_ra.php (retrieved 11 October 2015).
7. Values of lower levels are disregarded for countries with more than two tiers, since, as one reviewer pointed out, it would overestimate regional authority for those regions, and values for lower tiers are not consistently available for small entities.
8. Unfortunately, the questionnaire only asks whether respondents voted in the last national, not the regional election. Although the argument suggests more obvious participatory effects on the latter, I am confident, on the one hand, in stretching the concept a little and using the former as a proxy. Theoretically, it seems plausible to expect the participatory effects of regional institutions to ‘spill over’ into the national sphere. And in empirical terms, electoral participation on different levels is usually highly correlated. Considering, on the other hand, the second-order nature of many regional elections, it remains to be seen whether the hypothesised relationship in fact appears empirically. Besides voting, the wording of the questions reads: ‘There are different ways of trying to improve things [in country] or help prevent things from going wrong. During the last 12 months, have you done any of the following: Have you contacted a politician, government or local government official? Have you worked in a political party or action group? Have you taken part in a lawful public demonstration? Have you boycotted certain products?’
9. I also tested using fractionalisation of ethnic groups instead, but the results are virtually the same.
10. In contrast to previous models, I refrain from controlling explicitly for population density in IV models, because it is highly correlated with the instrument size of a region.
11. In the same vein, it would also be conceivable that the degree of fractionalisation in a country moderates the relationship between self-rule and participation, but testing such interaction effects yields no significant results. Furthermore, the study considered other potential interactions with, for instance, political interest or satisfaction with government. However, no meaningful interaction effects were found in the models.