such example. Over the years, Québec’s political parties have wavered in their interest in international relations. The lone exception, the Parti Québécois, has been more active in debating international issues at their conferences through the Comité des Relations Internationales (CRI). The CRI’s objectives and actions were concerned largely with collecting information and fostering partnerships and international relations that might help Québec play a larger role on the world stage in the event that it becomes a sovereign state. After its 2003 defeat, however, debates on international issues have waned within the Parti Québécois, which has reverted back to mobilizing public opinion on the issue of cultural diversity. While cultural diversity has remained an issue for the current Québec government, the Parti Québécois provided the impetus for a widespread debate on the issue, portraying itself as the defender of cultural diversity. The Parti Québécois is thus an example of a political party within a multilevel system that furthers its own policy interests even where there is a shared jurisdiction in areas of foreign policy control. It has added its voice to the debate on cultural diversity, arguing in favour of its legal protection in the face of rampant globalization, and holding it up as a model for political parties in multilevel systems.
[25] Juan Rodriguez and Astrid Barrio study the role of political parties in Spain. Decentralization of unitary states, such as Spain, forces political parties to adapt to the new framework in order to remain competitive in a multilevel system. Rodriguez and Barrio set out to explain how statewide political parties interact in the context of Spanish multilevel competition through the use of coalition-based strategies, and how these strategies allow them to achieve optimum electoral and institutional performance. This multilevel competition is characterized by a regionally differentiated electoral system and calendar, a regional discrepancy between nationalist and regionalist demands in several regions, a challenging position of the parties representing these demands on each level, and the existence of electorates showing different behaviour on each electoral level. As a result of this competition and newly devolved institutions, statewide parties have gradually changed their discourse and organization in order to strengthen their electoral presence in different territories. These indicators can be used to measure this adaptation: vertical integration, as evidenced in the presence of formal and informal linkages between the central office and regional organizations; influence, evidenced in the increased importance of regional leaders in national politics; and autonomy, seen in the incidence of interference by national organizations in regional affairs. Rodriguez and Barrio argue that while statewide political parties are adapting to this new decentralization and form of competition, their main challenge comes from the rising importance of non-statewide parties (NSWP) at both the regional and national level; in order to understand the dynamics of Spanish politics, these salient levels of government cannot be overlooked, they suggest. They examine the growing strength of NSWPs in the national system as well as regional subsystems and statewide coalition strategies adopted by parties before and after regional elections. While decentralization has not impacted the number of NSWPs, it has increased their salience and influence on political institutions, providing a considerable challenge to statewide parties and forcing them to change their practices and strategies in order to remain competitive on both regional and national levels.
Kris Deschower examines the recently devolved federation of Belgium and its complex political system based on two overlapping substates, regions and language communities. Once a unitary state, Belgium became a federation following constitutional reforms in 1995. These reforms led to the disintegration of statewide parties and their complete disappearance from Belgian politics. Replacing them were increasingly autonomous substate governments divided from west to east by a language border. Flemish- and French-language populations – which make up 60% and 40% of the total population, respectively – wrangled over the terms of devolution, with Flemish speakers favouring a federation based on language communities, and French speakers arguing in favour of a devolution into three major regions. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, and overlapping language communities and territorial regions were [26] created, with the result that the Belgian federation and its political parties, today, are ruled by this linguistic bipolarity. This is evidenced at the federal level, where government must be made up of an equal share of French and Flemish speakers, and at the regional level, where electoral competitions are held within each language group. Political parties in Belgium are limited, in scope, to one of the two language communities and two of the three regions, and they are active on both federal and substate levels of government. This split party system produces two results, one for each language group, and ultimately denies differentiation between regional and federal elections because unilingual parties vie for the same votes at both levels, thereby causing a strong overlap. These major linguistic and regional cleavages and the divergent views of Belgium at the time of devolution are responsible for its complex institutional setup and division at regional and federal levels of government.
V
How will parliamentarians in Europe and North America respond to the emerging challenges raised by globalization and the manifold changes in multilevel politics? Pablo Oñate looks at the increasing professionalization of politics in Spain and the ensuing movement between political arenas in a multilevel system. Starting in 1977, during the country’s transition to democracy, politics was simultaneously professionalized with the institutionalization of a new political system. Political elites were influenced by the very political system they set about designing, Oñate notes, drawing a close connection between institutionalization, professionalization and democratization. The old model political career ladder does not apply in Spain, as regional jurisdictions now hold greater appeal in some regards, due in part to decentralization and the advent of a broader political spectrum, both statewide and non-statewide. This has led to the creation of a large regional administration with many positions available. The changing structure of the state, as a result, has given rise to new structural opportunities, lending new directional characteristics to political careers: unidirectional, alternative, integrated, or reverse spring-board. Oñate examines how these four factors influence the structure of opportunities available to career politicians in terms of the movement between levels of government. There is no clear ladder model, he argues, but rather an integrated political class, one that remains on the same level or moves from one to the next, depending on the opportunities available, with national identity also playing a role in this movement.
In his chapter “Bringing Politicians Back In: Political Careers and Political Class in Multilevel Systems,” Klaus Stolz maintains that a more complete [27] analysis of MLG systems can be achieved by examining the simultaneous professionalization of politics and territorial reorganization. Pairing data from studies on territorial politics with career studies, Stolz examines how these new career paths shape institutional politics and, conversely, how new institutional arrangements produce differing career paths, with broad-ranging implications for decentralization, regionalization, and supranational integration. Stolz challenges the notion that regional government is a mere stepping stone to national or federal politics, arguing that movements between levels of government do not follow the traditional springboard structure and vary greatly among federalized states. While acknowledging that this structure is present in the United States, Stolz, citing the example of Canada and a number of EU member states, shows that political careers, in these states, follow no clear territorial direction. Instead, a host of factors – the federalization of unitary states, a strong sense of national identity in some regions, a rise in the number of positions to fill at the regional level, and the structure of elections and party systems – ensures that a regional career path remains a goal in its own right and may hold as much or more appeal than national politics. The reciprocal and intimately linked relationship between political professionalization and territorial reorganization, with one shaping the other and vice versa, is thus important to the study and understanding of multilevel systems.
Finally, Peverill Squire analyzes the American federal system from its inception with the Constitution in 1789 to the present day. More specifically, he looks at the combined impact of fiscal federalism and policy devolution on the shift in control of U.S. public policy from the states to Washington. While difficult to predict, there has been a trend towards giving policy control back to the states, he argues, with Republicans
