Oxford University Press, Date: 2012-06-18. Hardcover. Very Good. 0.9449 in x 9.2913 in x 6.1417 in. 2012. Oxford University Press ISBN 0199691576 9780199691579 [US]

Hard Cover. New. New Book; Fast Shipping from UK; Not signed; Not First Edition; The Challenging the State: Devolution and the Battle for Partisan Credibility: A Comparison of Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. ISBN 0199691576 9780199691579 [GB]

ISBN10: 0199691576, ISBN13: 9780199691579, [publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford] Hardcover Hardcover. How do state parties react to the challenge of peripheral parties demanding political power to be devolved to their culturally distinct territories? Is devolution the best response to these demands? Why do national governments implement devolution given the high risk that devolution will encourage peripheral parties to demand ever more devolved powers? The aim of this book is to answer these questions through a comparative analysis of devolution in four Europeancountries: Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The author argues that electoral competition between state and peripheral parties pushes some state parties to prefer devolution at someparticular point in time. Devolution is an electoral strategy adopted in order to make it more difficult in the long term for peripheral parties to increase their electoral support by claiming the monopoly of representation of the peripheral territory and the people in it. The strategy of devolution is preferred over short-term tactics of convergence towards the peripheral programmatic agenda because the pro-periphery tactics of state parties in unitary centralised states are not credible inthe eyes of voters. The price that state parties pay for making their electoral tactics credible is the 'entrenchment' of the devolution programmatic agenda in the electoral arena. The final implicationof this ...