In recent decades, regional pressures for stronger autonomy have encouraged a number of central and federal governments around the world to devolve powers and resources downwards to the regional level. The contemporary revival of regionalist movements and the simultaneous tendency towards greater government decentralisation have received considerable academic attention. Most of these contributions present detailed accounts of the processes of regional mobilisation and devolution in a specific region or set of regions. Although these analytical stories tell us a lot about the distinctive aspects of a particular case, they do not, in general, present a coherent theoretical account that would allow us to study the origins of these two interrelated but distinctive trends in a structured way. This thesis aims to make a contribution towards such an account. Building on the literature on political legitimacy and social movements, this study develops a tripartite typology of regionalisms which allows us to analyse and compare the origins of regional autonomy movements across different contexts. In addition, it seeks to show that an actor1based rational choice approach to the process of regionalist accommodation and non1accommodation can help us gain a better understanding of the mechanisms through which such demands influence the shape of the government system. The usefulness of the resulting theoretical framework is demonstrated by applying it to the contemporary history of regionalism and devolution in mainland Britain.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:542883 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Tijmstra, Sylvia A. R. |
| Publisher | London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/150/ |
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