Understanding the Welfare Attitudes of Ethnonational Minority Parties in Western Europe A Mixed-Method Approach

Political parties that claim to represent the interests of territorially based ethnonational communities have emerged as relevant actors in the production of welfare policies at multiple levels of authority. As a result of their growing influence, they are able to shape the ways in which welfare policies and institutions are thought of and debated at both the sub-national and statewide levels of government. Despite the rising evidence pointing in this direction, very limited attention has been devoted to exploring how they approach and impact welfare policy-making. This dissertation investigates how and why they decide to intervene in welfare policy-making. Furthermore, it delves deeper into the role of ideologic, institutional, socio-economic and party-competition factors influencing the welfare attitudes of ethnonational minority parties. The scope of this analysis centres on the period between 1990 and 2020 and focuses on Western European regions. It takes a comparative approach by investigating the welfare discourse developed during multiple statewide and regional level elections. A mixed research methodology enables both generalisable and precise findings regarding their welfare attitudes. As ethnonational parties are characterised by seeking nationalist agendas, I contend that they aim to utilise the significance of welfare institutions to foster ideas of a common identity, past, and future. The results confirm that they are less prone to emphasise welfare expansion in statewide elections, but their positioning is not significantly distinct from that of statewide parties regionally. In addition, the results robustly confirm that authority devolution to regional levels of government in the form of self-rule is likely to positively influence how they view solidarity within and beyond their communities. The dynamics of ethnonational party competition, governance, ideology, and regional socioeconomic factors strongly interact with each other to influence how ethnonational minority parties regard social policy and the role of the state. This dissertation significantly contributes to a more complete understanding of the relationship between nationalism and social policy in multilevel institutional configurations.