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When Do Countries Recentralize?Ideology and Party Politics in the Age ofAusterityDiego Muroa

a Institut Barcelona d'Estudis InternacionalsPublished online: 13 Mar 2015.

To cite this article: Diego Muro (2015) When Do Countries Recentralize? Ideology andParty Politics in the Age of Austerity, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 21:1, 24-43, DOI:10.1080/13537113.2015.1003485

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Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 21:24–43, 2015Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1353-7113 print / 1557-2986 onlineDOI: 10.1080/13537113.2015.1003485

When Do Countries Recentralize? Ideologyand Party Politics in the Age of Austerity

DIEGO MUROInstitut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals

The Spanish executive centralized political power to managethe politics of austerity better in the aftermath of the Great Re-cession. This article analyzes the reinforcement of the powerof the central government and argues that three explanatoryvariables—economic crisis, ideology, and party politics—accountfor recentralization, which is defined as fiscal consolidation, con-centration of competences, bureaucratic rationalization, and ide-ological convergence. The debate about the motives and nature ofrecentralization (de jure vs. de facto) further polarized the center-periphery cleavage. Regional prosovereignty parties interpreted thereversal of decentralization as another sign that accommodationwithin Spain was not possible and that contestation was the wayforward.

The Great Recession of the early twenty-first century had a remarkable impacton European politics. The most immediate political consequence of the eco-nomic crisis was the change of color of most European governments follow-ing the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. In line with theoriesof economic voting, European electorates quickly proceeded to punish bothcenter-left and center-right executives for the poor macroeconomic perfor-mance of their countries.1 In Spain, the incumbent government of Jose LuisRodrıguez Zapatero was punished for its erratic management of the crisis andthe new executive led by Mariano Rajoy Brey was given a mandate to gov-ern Spain in the November 2011 elections. The conservatives of the PartidoPopular (PP) won 186 members of parliament (MPs) (in a chamber of 350)and the social democrats of the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol (PSOE)obtained their worst electoral results ever (losing 59 seats, from 169 to 110).

Address correspondence to Diego Muro, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals(IBEI), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Edifici Merce Rodoreda, c/Ramon Trias Fargas 25-2708005,Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: dmuro@ibei.org

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When Do Countries Recentralize? 25

The priority of the Rajoy government was the management of the eco-nomic crisis. During his legislature, the conservative executive imposed aseries of austerity measures (spending cuts and tax rises) in order to regainmarket confidence and to avoid a bailout of the economy. The country en-forced an internal devaluation strategy that involved reducing labor costsand balancing national budgets with the aim of restoring international com-petitiveness. Even though the policy succeeded in bringing down wages,the economy contracted, the budget deficit skyrocketed, and the numberof unemployed rose to a staggering 27% by early 2013. In parallel with thebudget cuts, several savings banks (Bankia, Caixa Catalunya, Caja de Ahor-ros del Mediterraneo, Nova Galicia, etc.) had to be rescued by funding fromthe European Union and for a total cost of €50 billion, a bill that would beeventually fall on the Spanish taxpayer.

The combination of bank bailouts and austerity measures enraged Span-ish public opinion. On top of enduring the social consequences of budgetcuts, taxpayers became ultimately responsible for the mismanagement bytheir political and economic elites. The politicization of this sense of injus-tice resulted in a series of social movements that opposed budget cuts ineducation and health as well as the eviction policy for mortgage defaulters.Other political consequences of the crisis were the increasing mistrust ofpolitical institutions and professional politicians, which were often describedas a self-interested and unrepresentative political class (or caste), and theemergence of new political parties, such as Podemos, that adopted differentforms of “protest populism.”2

Last but not least, the financial, economic, and social crisis of 2008 un-dermined the autonomy of local and regional authorities. According to theCouncil of European Municipalities and Regions, Spain was not an exceptionin this area since other European authorities at local and regional levels alsohad to adapt to a new political context characterized by “budget restrictions”and “tendencies by national governments to recentralize competences.”3 Theneed to promote stabilization and to reduce public expenditure led EU mem-ber states to restrict the budgetary and operational capabilities of substate au-thorities. In short, the Great Recession created a window of opportunity thatmade possible the concentration of competences by central governments.4 InSpain, peripheral nationalists accused the conservative government of imple-menting an ideological agenda of recentralization. The regional premiers ofthe Basque Country and Catalonia voiced this criticism in relation to institu-tional issues of competences and fiscal resources but also about the new billson education and reform of the local administration. Members of the Rajoycabinet insisted that there was no such recentralization and, instead, repliedthat the recession required technical measures that assured “harmoniza-tion” and “rationalization”—words that peripheral nationalisms interpreted aseuphemisms.

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But was this the case? Was it appropriate to describe the Rajoy gov-ernment as one pushing for recentralization? To what extent was there atechnocratic response to the economic crisis? Could it be argued that re-centralization was guided by ideological motives? This contribution aims totackle these Spanish specificities while trying to identify the mechanismsthat may account for recentralization in a variety of institutional settings.Following the work of Eaton and Dickovic, it will define recentralizationas “fiscal consolidation, concentration of competences, bureaucratic ratio-nalization and ideological convergence.”5 With this working definition, itwill establish whether the first government of PM Mariano Rajoy pursued acoherent policy of recentralization, implemented rationalization and homog-enization as a way of countering the effects of the Great Recession or simplymade its Spanish nationalism more visible. Ultimately, the contribution aimsto answer the following research questions: Did the first Rajoy governmentrecentralize? And if so, what were the drivers?

The analysis is organized into six sections. First, there is a literaturereview of existing research on decentralization/recentralization, leading onto the specification of hypotheses. There is then an overview of the Span-ish process of devolution, followed by a discussion of the attempts of theconservative government to deal with the consequences of the Great Re-cession. The explanatory power of the independent variables on the lastgovernment of Mariano Rajoy is then tested. Finally, there is a discussion ofthe implications of these findings for nationalist politics in Spain.

WHEN DO COUNTRIES RECENTRALIZE?

Political scientists distinguish between federal and unitary states, dependingon whether all powers (legislative, executive, and judiciary) are accumulatedinto one, few, or many levels of government. Besides the usual disagree-ments over competing definitions of federalism,6 scholars often differ onwhether some states can be described as federal or not. There is consider-able agreement in describing some states as federal (for example, Argentina,Belgium, Germany, Mexico, the United States) whereas the unitary nature ofother polities is under dispute (for example, Italy, Russia, Spain, the UnitedKingdom, Venezuela). The source of confusion is found in the discrepancybetween what constitutional texts argue (de jure) and what state institutionsactually do (de facto). This article focuses on what governments actually do(instead of what they say they do) and calls this “de facto federalism” or“decentralization.”

Research on decentralization has concentrated on two key issues. Afirst stream of research has focused on explaining why decentralization hap-pens, whereas a second stream has tried to explain what happens following

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decentralization. Those scholars who focus on decentralization as an out-come (the first stream) argue that countries decide constitutionally to splittheir sovereignty into two or more territorial levels for geographical rea-sons (most federal states are large) to accommodate regional differences atthe substate level or to satisfy demands that arise from ethnic, linguistic,demographic, or cultural differences.7 Amongst the scholars who connectdemocracy with decentralization, there are some who argue that states usepower-sharing structures between state and substate levels to deal with pop-ular demands better, especially when preferences are heterogeneous.8 Someothers believe that pushing decision making down to the grassroots, partic-ularly in developing states, may also be welcomed by a community willingto participate in governance and to demand greater accountability from theirelected officials.9

The second stream of research has focused on explaining the conse-quences of having a decentralized political system. For these authors, the fo-cus of decentralization research has shifted attention from describing consti-tutional texts and federal institutions to actually studying the functioning andconsequences of having a sovereign system of government divided betweena central governing authority and its constituent political units. Substantial re-search has focused on establishing whether subnational units have not onlythe “authority” but also the “ability” to implement their policy choices. Thus,authors interested in fiscal federalism try to determine the adequate share oftax revenue and expenditure between the central government and all otherlevels of government.10 Another substantial body of research has focused ontheorizing territorial reforms as a function of party politics,11 whereas a morecritical view has analyzed the creation of self-interested regional elites andtheir responsibility for economic mismanagement and political crises.12

Contrary to the abundance of research on decentralization, however,the opposite process of recentralization has been much less studied.13 Someof the cases of recentralization for which there is some descriptive researchinvolve the polities of Bolivia, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Mongolia, Tanzania,and Venezuela. Research on decentralization and recentralization in thesecountries has mainly focused on the role of elected presidents,14 the tensionbetween de jure decentralizations and de facto centralizations,15 as well asthe role of political contexts and cultural legacies in understanding faileddecentralization policies during transition periods.16 Nonetheless, there is nosignificant research on why states recentralize in a variety of institutionalcontexts.

Given the lack of research on recentralization, a possible way forwardwould be to turn the decentralization agenda on its head. In theory, if ex-planatory variables of decentralization are allowed to vary, they should alsobe able to account for recentralization. The expectation would be for thedrivers of decentralization to also explain recentralization. However, researchfrom other fields has shown that the reasons for the implementation of a

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policy may have little to do with the cutting back of these very policies. Forinstance, Paul Pierson and his colleagues had to come up with a new seriesof variables to explore the politics of the “new” welfare state during the1980s. The politics of an era characterized by fiscal austerity and contentiouspolitics could not be understood as the mirror image of the postwar expan-sion of welfare states, for an era of retrenchment “creates a distinct set ofpolitical problems, empowers different actors, and dictates new strategies.”17

Consequently, it may be necessary to identify hypotheses that are specific tothe process of recentralization.

This contribution argues that three independent variables may accountfor the reinforcement of the powers of central governments, namely (1)economic crisis, (2) ideology, and (3) party politics. When formulated ashypotheses, these three variables help explain variation across time in theSpanish context.

First, economic crises induce recentralization measures. During an eco-nomic crisis, arguments in favor of efficiency, cost cutting, and rationaliza-tion are usually floated by central administrations.18 According to a studyby Canavier-Bacarreza and Martınez-Vazquez, one of the key drivers ofcentralization is the widely held assumption that the central governmentis the most efficient and effective structure for implementing measures ofmacroeconomic stabilization such as reducing fiscal deficits.19 The initiativeto implement measures of fiscal consolidation is often taken by a centralgovernment that assumes responsibility for the process of designing, im-plementing, monitoring, and controlling the budget stability of all levels ofgovernment. The balanced budget regulations designed at the central levelare then “diffused” to regional and local levels of government.20 Hence, thefirst “economic” hypothesis is the following:

Hypothesis 1: Central governments control substate levels of expendituremore intensively during periods of economic crisis.

Secondly, the political ideology of the incumbent party matters. The ideo-logical corpus or “color” of a party largely determines its preferences withregard to the degree of asymmetry between regions. Party competition islargely inspired by ideology, rather than simply by short-term tactical mo-tives. Although in Spain it is not possible to argue that the right is nationalistwhereas the left is not,21 there are important differences with regard towhether cultural specificities are recognized as “regional” or “national” dif-ferences. There are also substantial dissimilarities between conservatives andsocial democrats with regard to whether they have a centripetal view of thenation-state. Hence, the second “political” hypothesis is the following:

Hypothesis 2: Statewide parties whose ideology values the role of thestate in providing national coherence will support recentralization.

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Thirdly, the statewide parties’ strategies affect territorial reform. Being in op-position or in government yields a distinct set of political opportunity struc-tures for statewide parties, especially for the relationship between the partyand its supporters. The assumption is that parties in government are generallyreluctant to make policy concessions about decentralization unless they needthe support of regional parties and provided they can “sell” the reform totheir electorate.22 The political calculations of representatives (as well as theunderstanding of sympathizers) are determined by the parliamentary needsof statewide parties, especially if they are in government. When the Spanishgovernment has needed the parliamentary backing of nonstatewide parties,support in the chamber has been negotiated in exchange for further devolu-tion. Simply put, political decentralization would be the result of legislativebargaining between statewide parties and regional demands for territorialautonomy or independence.23 Hence, the third “political” hypothesis is thefollowing:

Hypothesis 3: Statewide parties are more likely to favor recentralizationwhen they do not need the support of regional parties.

To recapitulate, this article aims to identify the drivers of recentralizationand to test three hypotheses concerning the conservative government led byMariano Rajoy. The three propositions argue that the main building blocksof recentralization—fiscal consolidation, concentration of competences, bu-reaucratic rationalization and ideological convergence—may be explainedby three explanatory variables: (1) the economy, (2) party ideology, and (3)party strategy. Needless to say, the effect of these three independent vari-ables on the Spanish distribution of political power is likely to be mediatedby other domestic elements such as bureaucratic inertia, audience costs, andthe existence of institutional veto points. Before these hypotheses are tested,however, the following section provides an overview of the Spanish processof decentralization since the democratic transition.

THE SPANISH PROCESS OF DECENTRALIZATION

This section examines the decentralization of political power in Spain fromthe late 1970s to the present. The unfolding of the State of Autonomiesis divided into six phases, according to whether center-left or center-rightgovernments enjoyed absolute majorities in Parliament. The sequence ofstages also pays attention to the functioning of institutions, party politics,and policy outcomes.

The first phase of decentralization coincided with the development ofa pluralist democracy in Spain. Between 1978 and 1982, regions enactedStatutes of Autonomy and created substate governments and parliaments

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that were elected by its citizens. Regions that had historical traditions ofself-government—Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia—proceededalong a “fast route,” whereas those that did not have well-defined regionalidentities established their own institutions through a “slow route,” asprovided by articles 151 and 143 of the constitution. Andalusia, whichhad never previously demanded self-government rights, was an unusualcase and it joined the fast route. One of the interesting elements of thisphase was that, from the very beginning, there was a de jure and de factoasymmetry between the different communities as they had reached differentlevels of competences through diverse routes to autonomy. Although eachcommunity was able to negotiate a different bilateral autonomic agreement,the process of decentralization was tightly controlled by the acuerdosautonomicos (Ley Organica de Armonizacion del Proceso Autonomico[LOAPA] and Ley Organica de Financiacion de las Comunidades Autonomas[LOFCA]) and agreed upon between the governing center-right party of theUnion de Centro Democratico (UCD) and the socialist opposition (PSOE) inthe aftermath of the attempted coup d’etat of 1981.

During the second phase (1982–93), the socialist governments of FelipeGonzalez enjoyed an absolute majority. This decade was characterized byuncertainty over the jurisdiction of the newly established institutions andboth the central government and the Autonomous Communities (ACs) tookeach other to the Constitutional Court to solve their legal disputes. Most ofthe conflicts involved laws passed by the regional parliaments of the BasqueCountry, Galicia, and Catalonia but, as social learning took place, the num-ber of cases brought to the highest court in the land declined. By 1993, thenumber of cases had dropped from 60% to 12% and a process of harmo-nization of the level of autonomy for the 17 ACs took place. The autonomicagreements of 1992, which established an equal ceiling of competences forall autonomous communities, played an important role in smoothing out thetensions between the central government and the ACs.

The third phase was characterized by the dependence of the govern-ments of both Felipe Gonzalez and Jose Marıa Aznar on the parliamentarysupport of nationalist parties to formulate statewide policy outcomes (forexample, budgets). In both legislatures (1993–96 and 1996–2000), conser-vative parties from Catalonia, the Basque Country, and the Canary Islandsenjoyed privileged access to the central state while the main oppositionparty accused the incumbent government of yielding too easily to nationalistdemands. During the Gonzalez years, the regional and nationalist partiesextracted concessions regarding their roles in the policy-making process atthe national level but also the transfer of resources and powers from thecentral government to their respective autonomous communities. DuringAznar’s first government, the socialists accused the government of grantingfinancial benefits to the nationalists, as a percentage of the income tax wasautomatically transferred to the ACs. In short, the ability of peripheral parties

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to introduce a veto in the policy process allowed them to strengthen theregional cleavage, to force government action on issues of autonomy, andto consolidate their authority in the eyes of the regional constituency.

During the fourth phase, the second government of Aznar (2000–2004)was in receipt of an overall majority and did not favor political decentraliza-tion. This is not to say that the Aznar government launched an agenda ofrecentralization. If anything, the PP made its liberal and conservative valuesmore explicit and it revived the concept of Spain as a democratic nation.The central government appealed to constitutional patriotism as a way ofasserting the Spanish state and resisted attempts to turn Spain into a federalor confederal system. The PP leadership also expressed fear for the loss ofSpanish identity and heavily criticized the language policies of schools inCatalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, and Valencia. In other words, thesecond Aznar government slowed down the process of devolution but it didnot stop or reverse decentralization, a process with its own inertia.

The fifth phase comprised the first government of Rodrıguez Zapatero,which pursued a model of cooperative federalism in which multilateral inter-governmental cooperation and joint decision making became more preva-lent. Both pragmatism and ideological commitment helped to explain thePSOE’s policies on the reform of various autonomy statutes. On the onehand, an element of joint decision making was introduced because the gov-ernment was dependent on the parliamentary support of Izquierda Unida andthe Catalan nationalists of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), whowon five and eight seats respectively in the March 2004 general elections.On the other hand, after the aggressive policy of Aznar against regional de-mands, the PSOE was able to occupy the “nationalist friendly” political spacevacated by Aznar.24 The PSOE had substantial support in the highly popu-lated and industrialized areas of the Basque Country and Catalonia and it wasexpected that policies of territorial accommodation in these areas would betranslated into votes at the next general elections.

To sum up, this section has argued that the decentralization of politi-cal power in Spain from the late 1970s to the present can be divided intosix phases according to the ideology and parliamentary dominance of theincumbent government. The first phase (1978–82) started with the approvalof the 1978 Constitution and ended with the process of democratic consol-idation when many regions approved their statutes of autonomy. A secondphase (1982–93) followed the gradual emergence of the Estado de las Au-tonomıas under the three absolute majorities of the social democrats of thePSOE. During the third phase (1993–2000), there was greater cooperationbetween the center and the periphery as both the PSOE and PP govern-ments needed the parliamentary support of peripheral nationalist parties toapprove budgets and policies. The fourth phase (1996–2004) coincided withthe second government of Jose Marıa Aznar, a time when the PP enjoyed anabsolute majority and implemented a centralist agenda and then there was

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the fifth phase that covered the two governments of Rodrıguez Zapatero(2004–11) when a high number of territorial reforms were approved. Finally,a sixth phase started with the rise to power of Mariano Rajoy in 2011, whichis the main focus of the next section.

RATIONALIZATION OR RECENTRALIZATION?

This section provides an empirical overview of the territorial implicationsof the austerity policies of the Rajoy government and examines the tensionthey generated between the central government and the autonomous com-munities. Prior to examining these policies, however, the section describesthe domestic and international circumstances at the time of the election ofthe conservative government.

With regard to international factors, the rise to power of Mariano Rajoycannot be understood apart from the grave economic crisis that affected theworld economy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. During the yearsthat followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Spain had all the nec-essary elements for a perfect storm. In addition to the global financial crisisand the European sovereign-debt crisis, Spain had an acute property bubbleas well as high levels of public and especially private debt. The crisis hadsuch a heavy impact on Spain that it forced the previous government led bythe PM Jose Luis Rodrıguez Zapatero to make a U-turn in its economic policy(from expansion to austerity). This was in 2010 following international con-cerns about Spain’s public finances. The lack of market confidence in Spain’ssovereign debt was so evident that, in September 2011, the PSOE and the PPapproved an amendment to Article 135 of the Spanish Constitution introduc-ing a cap on the structural deficit of the state (national, regional, and local).Under this new constitutional rule, the state would not be able to spend morethan it collected, limiting the growth of public debt and guaranteeing the pub-lic finances in the long run. The “Golden Rule” amendment was due to comeinto force in 2020 when the public administration would be constitutionallyobliged to cap its budget deficit at 0.4% of GDP.25 The reform of deficit limitswas approved without Parliamentary debate in less than two weeks, whenSpaniards had been told for decades that their Carta Magna was almost un-touchable. The PSOE government was voted out of office two months later.

With regard to domestic factors, the victory of the conservatives in theparliamentary elections of November 2011 must be understood in terms ofthe desire of the electorate to replace a government that had not reactedquickly enough to adverse economic conditions (for example, burstingof the existing economic bubbles). Among the key worries of Spaniards,unemployment was first, as the number of unemployed had skyrocketed to27% of working Spaniards in early 2013. Besides joblessness and economicaffairs, the issue that most concerned an increasingly disaffected Spanish

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TABLE 1 Spain’s Budget Deficit and Public Debt (% of GDP), 2004–2014

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014∗

Budget Deficit −0.1 +1.3 +2.4 +2.0 −4.5 −11.1 −9.6 −9.6 −10.6 −7.1 −4.2Public Debt 46.3 43.2 39.7 36.3 40.2 54.0 61.7 70.5 86.0 93.9 97.6

© Eurostat and Spain’s Economy Ministry. Reproduced by permission of Eurostat and Spain’s EconomyMinistry. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.∗2014 are estimates.

citizenry was the impunity of those accused of political corruption. Between2011 and 2014, a series of scandals rocked the political establishment andsome of its central political institutions, such as the monarchy. Politiciansfrom the main statewide parties were accused of illegal party donations,bribery, and kickbacks from businesses seeking contracts (Gurtel, BlackCards of Bankia, Barcenas). Cases of corruption and misuse of public fundsalso involved the trade unions (Dismissal Program in Andalusia), peripheralnationalists (Palau de la Musica, Pallerols, Pujol,) business organizations(Marsans) and the son-in-law of the King himself (Noos case). In short,what had started as an economic crisis quickly deteriorated into a political,institutional, and territorial crisis.

The main priority of the conservative government was to respond effec-tively to the Great Recession with a program of fiscal consolidation. As canbe seen in Table 1, the percentage of both public debt and public deficithad increased substantially since 2008. Spain’s public deficit and public debtgrew annually between 2004 and 2014, partly due to the high yield on Span-ish debt. In addition, the forecasts predicted that public debt could reach100% of GDP in 2015. As a result, the central government argued that theneed to balance the public accounts would inevitably lead to a “rationaliza-tion” of the public administration, by which it meant that public expenditurewould be drastically reduced. With the amendment of Article 135 of theConstitution in September 2011, Spain set itself the long-term task of bal-ancing public budgets. In the short term, this meant reducing the differencebetween revenues and spending as well as tackling the accumulated debt.

The debate on the efficiency of the State of Autonomies took place ina context of depleted resources for the state. On the one hand, the centralgovernment argued that reforms of the public administration were needed to“rationalize” the existing bureaucracy, to fix institutional inefficiencies, andto avoid duplications in the multilevel government of Spain. On the otherhand, the lower tiers of government complained that the state was using theeconomic crisis as an excuse to implement a centralization of political powerthat was inspired by ideological and partisan motives not technical ones.The governments of the autonomous communities of the Canary Islands, theBasque Country, and Catalonia, all of which were ruled by nationalist parties,voiced their opposition to the government’s reversal of decentralization.

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Catalonia produced the most forceful criticisms against the alleged un-equal distribution of the effort to reduce the budget deficit. According to theCatalan government, the crux of the matter was that the effort to cut publicdebt was not distributed fairly. As can be seen in Table 2, the proportionof public expenditure for each of the levels of government in 2013 was50.7% (central government), 35.7% (autonomous communities), and 13.6%(local level) but the effort to cut debt did not follow this pattern. The deficitgoals did not take into account the percentage of expenditure and clearlyfavored the central government. Whereas the ACs were forced to assume15.6% of the deficit, 20 points below what it should be, the central govern-ment took responsibility for 84.4% of the deficit, 33 points above its levelof expenditure. The autonomous communities and the local authorities hadreduced their expenditure (−14% and −21%, respectively) and, given theiralmost null ability to raise new taxes, they had been forced to cut publicservices. In the case of the autonomous communities, this had resulted ina serious decline of services in both education and health, two of the keycompetences of the substate level. According to the Catalan executive, thealternative would have been to allocate deficit goals according to responsi-bility in expenditure (third column in the table). With the existing allocation,the local municipalities could not incur any deficit whereas the goals forthe autonomous communities were much more stringent than they were forthe central government. Needless to say, it was also possible to argue thatseveral ACs had ended up spending far more than it was appropriate orreasonable. During the precrisis years, regional governments devoted mas-sive resources on their competences and did not adequately reflect on thelong-term financial sustainability of these policies.

The central government had an easier ride in terms of spending thanthe other levels of public administration. The strategy of fiscal consolidationled by the government of Mariano Rajoy resulted in an effective process ofrecentralization by which substate levels of government had their expendi-ture severely capped, resulting in a declining quality and quantity of welfare

TABLE 2 Distribution of Budget Deficit Goals According to Expenditure Responsibilities in2013

Expenditure Current Deficit GoalAlternative Deficit

Goal

Public Administration (% total) (% GDP) (% total) (% GDP) (% total)

Central Government 50.7 3.8 84.4 2.3 51.1Autonomous Communities 35.7 0.7 15.6 1.6 35.6Local Level 13.6 0 0 0.6 13.3TOTAL OF PUBLIC ADMIN 100 4.5 100 4.5 100

© Generalitat de Catalunya. Reproduced by permission of Generalitat de Catalunya. Permission to reusemust be obtained from the rightsholder.

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provision. The rationale for these reforms was to be found in the spendingfrenzy that, in the eyes of the Madrid-based government, regions had un-dergone in the years that preceded the crisis. From the point of view of theregions, however, autonomous communities had acquired competences butnot the ability to fund themselves, a problem that could only be resolvedwith a fiscal federalism that recalibrated the revenue and spending compe-tences in favor of ACs. Whether a technical program of “rationalization” oran ideological and partisan agenda of “recentralization” drove the reforms isbeside the point because, as the next section argues, the Rajoy governmenteffectively strengthened the role of the central administration.

WHY RECENTRALIZATION?

This section on hypothesis testing will evaluate the main policy outcomes ofthe Rajoy government between 2011 and 2014 and will conclude that therewas both de jure and de facto centralization. As it was noted earlier, it ispossible to make a conceptual distinction between federalism in legal orpractical terms. With regard to legal or de jure centralization, the two mainstatewide parties, the PSOE and the PP, agreed to amend Article 135 of theconstitution to cap the public deficit in September 2011, hence implementingan institutional reform. In addition, the political practice (de facto decentral-ization) of the Rajoy government pursued the reinforcement of the centralexecutive vis-a-vis the other levels of government.

The first hypothesis concerned the role the economic crisis played ininducing measures of recentralization. In the Spanish case, the central gov-ernment used the Great Recession as a window of opportunity to pursuereforms that would have met strong opposition otherwise. Some of themeasures implemented to tackle the crisis were salary reductions for civilservants, the reorganization of the Spanish public sector, and, in particular,the 2012 labor reform. These were all policies that would have been difficultto approve in the absence of extraordinarily adverse economic conditions.This is not to say that Rajoy’s cabinet had carte blanche in all policy areas orthat his government was always enjoying strategic dominance. As a matterof fact, the Rajoy government had to take a few bitter pills at the instigationof creditor countries and international lenders. For example, the EuropeanUnion pressed Spain to adopt a program of fiscal consolidation that resultedin high social costs for the citizenry (hence the term “austericide”) withconsiderable costs for the incumbent. The European Union increased its in-volvement in Spain’s policy making to the point that it was possible to talkabout an “implicit conditionality” to describe the European Union’s policydemands in return for buying sovereign debt.26

The economic crisis and the need for austerity allowed the Spanish gov-ernment to adopt rigid regulations and interventionist practices in regional

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budgets. The Rajoy government was not reluctant to implement austerity,because its policy preferences coincided with those of the international ac-tors, and it used the external demands to shrink public sector expenditureand to reduce the weight of the administration at the substate level. In otherwords, the executive capitalized on the window of opportunity presentedby the crisis and implemented reform in the public sector, while shiftingthe blame for the reforms to the international level. For instance, the cen-tral government took it upon itself to design, to implement, and to monitorand control budget stability across Spain. In the same way as the Troikahad used conditionality to force the Greek or Portuguese governments toimplement structural reforms, the Spanish government imposed budget con-straints on the regions that wanted to avoid a bail out. The central executivecreated a domestic mechanism, called the Regional Liquidity Fund (Fondode Liquidez Autonomico [FLA]), to provide funding for ACs at risk of de-fault. It constrained the regional governments and faithfully reproduced theEU schemes.27 According to this logic, “men in black” from the Ministry ofFinance could visit autonomous communities that did not balance their bud-gets and recommend reforms in exchange for access to liquidity and therefinancing of their regional debt.

The move towards austerity and deficit reduction went hand-in-handwith the central government’s monitoring of substate levels of government.28

The tightening of resources for local and regional administrations came to beinterpreted as a measure of recentralization. The distribution of nonfinancialexpenditure (operating expenses and investment) changed considerably as aresult of the external shock of the Great Recession. The central governmentgained dominance between 2008 and 2014 whereas the expenditure of localand regional administrations was reduced during the same period. As wasargued before, the need to comply with the European Union’s demandsfor budget stability was not distributed evenly between the three tiers ofgovernment.29

Some degree of recentralization was probably inevitable, as most Span-ish autonomous communities had experienced a boom of regional spendingbefore the crisis and later came to rely on the central administration to refi-nance their debt once the crisis had set in. The regions had no alternativesbecause, in the context of economic downturn, they could neither createnew sources of revenue nor increase existing taxes for fear of domestic de-mand contracting even further. In addition, the autonomous communitiesdid not have access to international money markets because their bonds hadbecome high yield (also known as junk bonds) and they had to resort to the“creditor” central administration. Since the biggest areas of spending at theregional level were health and education, the effect of the fiscal disciplineon the quantity and quality of services in these areas was hard-felt by thepopulation.

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All in all, it is possible to confirm the first hypothesis that economicrecentralization is more likely during times of want (Central governmentscontrol substate levels of expenditure more intensively during periods of eco-nomic crisis). Actually, it is difficult to imagine both a de jure and de factocentralization like the one implemented by the Rajoy government withoutthe window of opportunity provided by the Eurozone crisis.

The second hypothesis argued that the political color of the incum-bent matters. Contrary to the view that representatives are only interestedin short-term gains, there is substantial evidence that demonstrates that ide-ology (as reflected in party manifestos) is an element that guides the in-cumbent’s policy making. Electorates also judge negatively politicians whoabandon their ideological corpus or neglect its electoral promises. Needlessto say, rent-seeking representatives use blame-shifting strategies to exoner-ate themselves and to avoid being held accountable by manipulating theinformation available to voters.30 To argue that “ideology matters,” however,is not to say that political preferences are fixed. Representatives can adapt tochanging circumstances and can provide new commitments for which theywill ultimately be held accountable. Very often, representative politics notonly involves responding to citizens’ preferences but is also the very act ofconstructing those preferences by defining new problems and suggestingpossible solutions.

Ideologically, the conservative party held a unitary view of the Spanishnation. Contrary to the PSOE’s historical tradition, the PP had traditionallybeen more reluctant to decentralize political power and, when in power, hadonly transferred competences to the regions when they needed the supportof nationalist parties (for example, between 1996 and 2000). In addition, theconservatives had also tried to modernize Spanish nationalism by updatingsome of its mobilizing myths and symbols during the 2000s. Even thoughit is not possible to predict policy outputs on the basis of ideology it isnonetheless possible to make sense of some of the policies approved bythe Rajoy government by examining previous preferences. For example, theconservatives failed to pass a local administration bill in 2002 under PM JoseMarıa Aznar and a decade later, in 2013, the local government was reformedin order to harmonize and improve the management of what was describedas an inefficient level of government, particularly in smaller municipalities.The legislative proposal entitled “Sustainability and Rationalization of LocalGovernment” focused on the overlap of competences between the differ-ent levels of government and attempted to clearly attribute competences toeach level of administration.31 The existing local competences relating toeducation, health, and social services were transferred to the autonomouscommunities. Many of the services they provided for towns of fewer than20,000 inhabitants, which were deemed too small to be effective, would nowbe collectively managed by delegations from the central government, the so-called provincial councils (diputaciones provinciales). In spite of accounting

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for less than 4% of all Spanish debt, the municipalities were extensively re-formed and became residual administrations, which were only allowed toact on domains clearly authorized by national or regional laws. A zero-sumgame could be observed between higher and lower levels of governmentwith the latter losing competences in favor of larger ones.32

Ideological preferences also explain the adversarial strategy of the con-servatives in the design and approval of the education bill LOMCE (LeyOrganica de Mejora de la Calidad Educativa), which was popularly knownas Ley Wert, hence taking the name of the education minister Jose IgnacioWert33. The autonomous communities of Andalucıa, the Basque Country,and Catalonia (where the PP was not in power) opposed the bill becauseit gave greater power to the Ministry of Education to standardize the cur-riculum throughout Spain. Another key reason for the opposition was thefact that it disputed the model of “language immersion” in the autonomouscommunities with more than one language. In these communities, core sub-jects were taught in Catalan, Galician, or Basque while Spanish was taughtseveral hours a week as a second language. This controversial section of thebill that required regions to offer fewer courses in regional languages wasapproved to satisfy parents who wanted a stronger Spanish presence.

As expected, the PP government approved education and local admin-istration reforms and the social democrats of the PSOE and other left-wingparties opposed them. However, it is impossible to argue that similar initia-tives would not have been approved had a center-left party been in gov-ernment. The counterfactual argument is important, as several authors haveargued that the preferences of the party are played out differently, depend-ing on whether the party is in government or in opposition.34 To conclude,although nationalist preferences seem to play a very significant role, it is notpossible to fully confirm the second “political” hypothesis fully (Statewideparties whose ideology values the role of the state in providing national co-herence will support recentralization). Further research and a triangulationof findings through elite interviews may be needed in order to assert therelevance of ideology in explaining policy outputs.

The third hypothesis argued that the statewide parties’ strategies affectterritorial reform. The assumption was that parties in government are gener-ally reluctant to make policy concessions over decentralization unless theyneed the support of regional parties and they can sell the reform to theirelectorate. In other words, political decentralization is often explained bythe legislative bargaining power of statewide parties vis-a-vis regional par-ties with territorial demands.35 In the case of Rajoy, his government enjoyedan absolute majority and did not require the parliamentary support of non-statewide parties (peripheral nationalists included). In addition, the mainopposition party, the PSOE, underwent an internal crisis and was unable toconfront strongly the incumbent in the legislature on any issue regarding thecentralization of powers.

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The opportunity provided by the crisis allowed the incumbent to asso-ciate “decentralization” with “public deficit” and suggested that centralizationof powers was a solution for public squandering, crony politics, and corrup-tion at the substate level. The argument about party politics was confirmedby the identical behavior of the conservative governments that enjoyed aparliamentary majority, both under Aznar and Rajoy. These two executivesprojected the Spanish national project at the expense of alternative nationalideologies within Spain, such as the Catalan and Basque national projects.Furthermore, the PP-led regional governments played a legitimating role inthe process of recentralization by highlighting the inefficiency and corrup-tion of autonomous communities. As has been argued by Nagore Calvo,both Esperanza Aguirre, former president of the Autonomous Community ofMadrid, and Maria Dolores de Cospedal, the president of Castile-La Manchaand secretary-general of PP, became the greatest exponents of this process.36

All in all, the parliamentary dominance of the Rajoy government makes pos-sible the confirmation of the third “political” hypothesis (Statewide parties aremore likely to favor recentralization when do they do not need the support ofregional parties).

To recapitulate, this section has identified three independent variablesthat account for some of the centralizing reforms of the Rajoy government.The concentration of political power primarily affected the financial re-sources, competences, and policy areas at substate levels of government.The ongoing dispute about the decentralization of political power was aconflict between the center and the periphery as well as a competitionbetween nationalist projects but, more importantly, it was the result of astate-led effort to shrink the size of the public administration in an age ofausterity.

CONCLUSION

The management of the economic crisis became the priority for the Spanishgovernments of the post-2008 period. The structural reforms of the Rajoy ad-ministration were justified to disgruntled voters in terms of a need to restorethe confidence of the international markets and to improve the country’scompetitiveness. However, the Great Recession also provided the incum-bent with a unique window of opportunity to implement reforms that werecongruent with their party preferences. The Spanish conservatives were infavor of having balanced budgets, implementing labor reform, and reduc-ing the size of the state. The crisis allowed the PP to implement thesereforms at a relatively lower cost to the government itself. Instead of invest-ing political capital in convincing the citizenry of the need for the politicsof austerity, the executive was able to soften the social response by argu-ing that the EU’s implicit conditionality forced them to make these changes

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and hence the blame (and the responsibility) for the policy decisions wasshifted.

In contrast to what occurred in other policy areas, the framing of the de-bate on recentralization in economic terms was contested by the periphery.Whereas the Spanish executive argued that there was an economic imper-ative to rationalize the public sector and to limit both public expenditureand debt, some autonomous communities argued that the tightening of re-gional and local budgets was simply an ideological attempt to recentralizepower back to Madrid. The true motives behind the decision to recentralizecannot be identified with precision as they may range from political oppor-tunism to the use of fiscal policy as a stabilizer during the Great Recession.What is clear is that both de jure and de facto centralization took place. Theargument here has been that three explanatory variables—economic crisis,ideology, and party politics—accounted for this new phenomenon and thatonly time will tell whether the slowdown in the process of decentralization ispermanent or temporary. In addition, further work may have to test whetherthese three variables can account for variations across time and space orwhether the list of variables needs to be expanded to include institutionsand audience costs as well as partisan veto players and types of federalism.

Besides being a distinctive case study, the Spanish process of recentral-ization under Rajoy has implications for several other debates in the fieldof comparative politics: (1) the dilemma of responsiveness versus responsi-bility; (2) the center-periphery cleavage; and (3) the ability of institutions tocontain nationalist conflict.

Firstly, the Eurozone crisis highlighted the gap between the govern-ment’s responsiveness and responsibility.37 Southern European countrieswith junk debt faced a dilemma between being responsive to citizens (whodemanded an economic alternative to austerity) and responsible to externalagents (for example, international institutions, EU member states, etc.), whowanted the Southern periphery to honor its debts. Incumbents preferredto honor international responsibilities by implementing internal devaluationand fiscal adjustment (long after they had proved ineffective) and neglectedthe preferences of an increasingly disaffected citizenry. In the case of Spain,the introduction of budget discipline and a rationalization of regional andlocal government architecture during the sovereign debt crisis resulted indeclining autonomy for regions.

Secondly, the debate on the efficacy of Spain’s multilevel governmentcontributed more tension to the relations between regionally based national-ist parties and defenders of the Spanish homeland. From the periphery, therecentralization measures were perceived as an attack on the institutions ofself-government and a clear expression of state nationalism. The dynamicsof nationalist hegemony and party competition in some regions were alsoaffected by the politics of austerity. In Catalonia, the recentralization mea-sures gave more arguments to those in favor of organizing a referendum to

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exercise the right to self-determination. Pundits suggested that the absenceof credible proposals to reform the 1978 Constitution and the recentralizationinitiatives pushed Catalan citizens into the arms of secessionism. The initia-tives of the PP government made the accommodation of nationalist demandsmore difficult and contestation from the periphery more likely.

Thirdly, the economic crisis brought to the fore the question of theability of Spanish institutions to contain nationalist conflict. Conventionally,nationalist aspirations had been channeled through the peripheral parties’participation in the governance of Spain but the drive towards sovereigntyand statehood made coalition politics and legislative bargaining very im-probable. In addition, the absolute majority of Rajoy in Parliament allowedhim to ignore the opposition’s views and rule by decree law. A final doubtremains as to whether the radicalization of nationalist politics, particularly inCatalonia, reached a point where collaboration with Madrid might neither besought nor desired. The frustration of many Catalans with the Spanish stateconvinced a substantial minority that a compromise was no longer possible.In the absence of proposals to accommodate the nationalists’ demands (per-haps through a reform of the funding system or the constitution), between35% and 45% of Catalans thought they would be better off going it alone.

Whether the measures of recentralization become long lasting orwhether they were contingent on the economic crisis remains to be seen.The conditions or variables that favored the centralization of political powerare likely to wane in the near future and a new situation may emerge. Themetaphor of the pendulum swing suggests that a new stage of decentraliza-tion may be approaching, but history does not repeat itself in a mechanicalfashion. The next stage of Spanish politics will probably be characterized byboth contestation and accommodation.

NOTES

1. Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Mary Stegmaier, “Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes,”Annual Review of Political Science 3(1): 183–219 (2000).

2. Hanspeter Kriesi, “The Populist Challenge,” West European Politics 37(2): 368 (2014).3. Council of European Municipalities and Regions, Decentralisation at a Crossroads: Ter-

ritorial Reforms in Europe in Times of Crisis (October 2013), 1, http://www.ccre.org/img/uploads/piecesjointe/filename/CCRE_broch_EN_complete_low.pdf

4. John T. S. Keeler, “Opening the Window for Reform: Mandates, Crises, and ExtraordinaryPolicy-Making,” Comparative Political Studies 25(4): 433–86 (1993).

5. Ken Eaton and Tyleer J. Dickovick, “The Politics of Recentralization in Argentina and Brazil,”Latin American Research Review 39(1): 94 (2004).

6. William Riker, “Federalism,” in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., Handbookof Political Science 5: Governmental Institutions and Processes (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975),93–172; Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987); VincentOstrom, The Meaning of American Federalism: Constituting a Self-Governing Society (San Francisco:Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1991).

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7. Simon Toubeau and Emanuele Massetti, “The Party Politics of Territorial Reforms in Europe,”West European Politics 36(2): 297–316 (2013).

8. James Buchanan, “Federalism as an Ideal Political Order and an Objective for ConstitutionalReform,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 25: 19–28 (1995); Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore, “Onthe Number and Size of Nations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112: 1027–56 (1997).

9. World Bank, Decentralization in Client Countries: An Evaluation of World Bank Support,1990–2007 (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008).

10. Alberto Dıaz-Cayeros, Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Roger D. Congleton, “Asymmetric Federalism and the Polit-ical Economy of Decentralization,” in Ethisham Ahmad and Giorgio Brosio, eds., Handbook of FiscalFederalism (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2006).

11. Sonia Alonso, Challenging the State: Devolution and the Battle for Partisan Credibility – AComparison of Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012);Simon Toubeau and Emanuel Massettti, Emanuele, “The Party Politics of Territorial Reforms in Europe,”West European Politics 36(2): 297–316 (2013).

12. Eric Wibbels, “Federalism and the Politics of Macroeconomic Policy and Performance,” Ameri-can Journal of Political Science 44: 687–702 (2000); Jonathan Rodden, “The Dilemma of Fiscal Federalism:Grants and Fiscal Performance Around the World,” American Journal of Political Science 46: 670–87(2000).

13. Two notable exceptions are Tyler J. Dickovic, Decentralization and Recentralization in theDeveloping World (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011) and Ken Kollman, Perilsof Centralization: Lessons from Church, State, and Corporation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2013).

14. Ken Eaton, “Recentralization and the Left Turn in Latin America: Diverging Outcomes in Bolivia,Ecuador, and Venezuela,” Comparative Political Studies 47(8): 1130–57 (2014).

15. Ambrose T. Kessy and Willy McCourt, “Is Decentralization Still Recentralization?: The LocalGovernment Reform Programme in Tanzania,” International Journal of Public Administration 33(12–13):689–97 (2010).

16. Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Ines Stolpe, “Decentralization and Recentralization Reform in Mongo-lia: Tracing the Swing of the Pendulum,” Comparative Education 40(1): 29–53 (2004).

17. Paul Pierson, ed., The New Politics of the Welfare State (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2001), 2.

18. Massimo Bordignon, “Economic Crisis and Recentralization of Government: The Italian Expe-rience,” in IEB Report on Fiscal Federalism Fiscal 2012 (Barcelona: Institut d’Economia de Barcelona,2012), 64–69.

19. Gutavo Canavire-Bacarreza and Jorge Martınez-Vasquez, “Fiscal Decentralization andEconomic Crisis,” in IEB Report on Fiscal Federalism Fiscal 2012 (Barcelona: Institut d’Economia deBarcelona, 2012), 37.

20. Silvia Bogherini, “Can Austerity Lead to Recentralisation?: Italian Local Government during theEconomic Crisis,” South European Society and Politics 19(2): 193 (2014).

21. See Alejandro Quiroga, “Amistades peligrosas. La izquierda y los nacionalismos catalanes yvascos (1975–2008),” Historia y Polıtica 20: 97–127 (2008); Diego Muro and Alejandro Quiroga, “SpanishNationalism: Ethnic or Civic?,” Ethnicities 50(1): 9–29 (2005).

22. Diego Muro, “Territorial Accommodation, Party Politics, and Statute Reform in Spain,” SouthEuropean Society & Politics 14(4): 453–68 (2009).

23. Tania Verge, “Party Strategies on Territorial Reform: State-Wide Parties and the State of the Au-tonomies in Spain,” West European Politics 36(2): 317–37 (2013); Francesc Amat and Albert Falco-Gimeno,“The Legislative Dynamics of Political Decentralization in Parliamentary Democracies,” Comparative Po-litical Studies 47(6): 820–50 (2014).

24. Diego Muro, Ethnicity and Violence (London & New York: Routledge, 2008), Ch. 7.25. Jose M. Abad and Javier Herandez Galante, “Spanish Constitutional Reform: What Is Seen and

Not Seen,” Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) 253: 1 (2011).26. Stefano Sacchi, “Conditionality by Other Means: EU Involvement in Italy’s Structural Reforms

in the Sovereign Debt Crisis,” Comparative European Politics (forthcoming).27. The so-called Fondo de Liquidez Autonomico (FLA) was created by the Organic Law 2/2012

of Budget Stability and Financial Sustainability (27 April 2012) and was developed in the subsequentRoyal Decree 21/2012 of Liquidity Measures for Public Administrations in the Financial Area (13 July2012).

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28. Cesar Colino and Eloısa del Pino, “Spanish Federalism in Crisis,” in Paul Peterson and DanielNadlers, eds., The Global Debt Crisis. Haunting US and European Federalism (Washington: BrookingsInstitution Press, 2014), 173.

29. Carles Viver Pi-Sunyer and Gerard Martı, “The Recentralisation Process of the State of Au-tonomies,” in IEB Report on Fiscal Federalism Fiscal 2012 (Barcelona: Institut d’Economia de Barcelona,2012), 46–63.

30. Adam Przeworski, Susan Stokes, and Bernard Manin, eds., Democracy, Accountability, andRepresentation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

31. Ley de Racionalizacion y Sostenibilidad de la Administracion Local [Sustainability andRationalization of Local Government] (27/2013), Official State Bulletin (BOE), 27 Dec. 2013.https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2013/12/30/pdfs/BOE-A-2013-13756.pdf (accessed 4 Feb. 2015).

32. Council of European Municipalities and Regions, Decentralisation at a Crossroads:Territorial Reforms in Europe in Times of Crisis (http://www.ccre.org/img/uploads/piecesjointe/filename/CCRE_broch_EN_complete_low.pdf, October 2013), 10 & 54.

33. Ley Organica de Mejora de la Calidad Educativa (8/2013), Official State Bulletin (BOE), 9 Dec.2013. http://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2013/12/10/pdfs/BOE-A-2013-12886.pdf (accessed 4 Feb. 2015).

34. Tania Verge, “Party Strategies on Territorial Reform: State-Wide Parties and the State of theAutonomies in Spain,” West European Politics 36(2): 317–37 (2013).

35. Francesc Amat and Albert Falco-Gimeno, “The Legislative Dynamics of Political Decentraliza-tion in Parliamentary Democracies,” Comparative Political Studies 47(6): 820–50 (2014).

36. Nagore Calvo, “Crisis Management, Re-Centralization and the Politics of Austerity in Spain,”International Journal of Iberian Studies 27(1): 13 (2014).

37. Peter Mair, Representative Versus Responsible Government, Working Paper (Cologne: MaxPlanck Institute for the Study of Societies, 2009), 13.

Diego Muro is Assistant Professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Interna-cionals (IBEI). His main research interests are comparative politics, nationalismand ethnic conflict, security studies, and terrorism and counter-terrorism. Hiswork has been published in the following journals: Politics, Nations and Nation-alism, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Ethnic and Racial Studies, South EuropeanSociety & Politics, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.

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