Left and Right in the Basque Country and Catalonia: The Meaning of Ideology in a Nationalist Context

Why are the Basques and Catalans the most left-wing societies in Europe? Treating peripheral nationalism and ideology as two orthogonal dimensions, the literature to date has not yet provided a systematic theoretical account of this pattern. In an attempt to fill this gap, this paper explores how nationalism has marked the meaning of ideology in these regions. Contrary to the left, the right has been treated as the opponent of regional devolution. The findings highlight the need to revise the orthogonality assumption often made when employing these two dimensions in the study of public opinion in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Keywords: Left–RightDecentralisationBasque CountryCataloniaPeripheral NationalismSpain Notes [1] This is not equally true for the main spatial dimension used as an equivalent of the LR scale in the United States (US), namely the distinction between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’. Both these terms represent ideological labels and this makes it more difficult to attach different issue-specific or value-based connotations to them (Conover & Feldman Citation1981; Fuchs & Klingemann Citation1990; Ennser Citation2010). [2] For a concise summary of the importance of regional identity in party competition in Catalonia and the Basque Country see Amat (2012). A more general introduction to the Spanish party system and its regional particularities is provided in the introduction of this special issue. [3] This difference does not seem to be due to the fact that the information for the Basque Country and Catalonia comes from a different survey. The mean LR self-placement of the 94 EES respondents residing in the Northeast of Spain is 3.92. The equivalent estimate shown in Figure 1 is 3.76. For the EES respondents residing in all other regions of Spain mean LR self-placement is 4.86, whereas in Figure 1 the equivalent score is 4.57. [4] The fist step in this analysis has been to see whether sociodemographic characteristics could account for this pattern. In effect, controlling for subjective income, gender, age (fully factorised) and professional status seems to leave the gap intact in the Basque Country and to increase it in Catalonia. [5] It needs to be mentioned from the outset that the scale used to capture attitudes towards peripheral nationalism is a policy-oriented question that refers to people's views about the degree of centralisation in the country. When a different scale is used, namely whether the respondent would like or dislike the idea of a region of the country declaring independence in the future, the results are even more suggestive about the impact of nationalism on LR self-placement in the two regions under investigation here. The reason that the policy-driven scale is used throughout the analysis is that this is the scale for which party placements are also provided. [6] This pattern complements nicely with Amat's finding (Table 3 in this special issue) about the conditioning effect of socialization on the impact of identity on attitudes towards regional redistribution. [7] It is important to note that the same name for the party was employed in all interviews across the country, i.e. PSOE. Thus, although one could argue that Catalans and Basques have the regional branches of the party in mind when responding to the questions about PSOE (PSC in Catalonia and PSE-EE in the Basque Country), the question wording has at least mediated this problem, by using the same name for the party across all regions.