In The National Question, Éric Bélanger, Richard Nadeau, Ailsa Henderson and Eve Hepburn, leading experts on the politics of Quebec and Scotland, explore how the national question influences the behaviours of parties and voters in these regions. Their book is the first comparative study of these regions that directly compares the behaviours of parties and voters with respect to the national question.
They conduct in-depth analyses of both types of actors’ behaviours in the 2011 Canadian federal election, the 2014 Quebec provincial election, the 2010 United Kingdom national election and the 2011 Scottish regional election. They do so using data from party manifestos, semistructured interviews with party elites and survey data from each election.
The authors’ main argument is that the national question—which consists of debates over the political status of each region, as well as the protection and promotion of each region's identity and interests (100)—is not merely a niche issue but is instead a mainstream issue at the substate level. They contend that it is, in fact, the primary dimension underlying political competition at that level.
Furthermore, they assert that the national question is composed of three separate dimensions: the debate over each region's constitutional status, the affirmation of its identity and the defense of its regional interests. They argue that the first dimension represents a positional issue, while the second and third are valence issues. Constitutional options in each region divide parties and the public. However, all are united in the affirmation of the regional identity and the defence of regional interests.
While each party adopts a particular position in the constitutional debate, parties compete to appear as the strongest defender of regional identity and interests. They do so to win votes from the large majorities of voters who consider these aspects of the national question important.
The biggest strengths of the book are its parallel focus on parties and voters and the comparison it offers between Quebec and Scotland. This approach allows the authors to show how parties and voters in each region deal with the different dimensions of nationalism. It allows them to show, for example, that parties at the sub-state level in both Quebec and Scotland focus on promoting the regional identity and interests. It also allows them to show that the national issue plays a key role in structuring voting behaviour in Quebec, which is much less the case in Scotland.
The authors’ analyses have major implications for parties’ electoral strategies. The pro-independence positions adopted by the Parti Québécois and the Scottish Nationalist Party are supported by minorities of voters in their respective regions. Those parties, consequently, adopt appeals to the regional identity and interests—dimensions of the national question that they own—to receive support from more moderate voters who oppose secession. Moreover, since overwhelming majorities of Quebecers and Scots believe in promoting regional identity and interests, non-secessionist parties also seek to promote regional identity and interests to gain support from voters.
While The National Question makes a major contribution to the study of both party and voter behaviour in the context of regional nationalism, it disappointingly fails to make the connection between the two. Party positions and voting behaviour are discussed in separate chapters, and no empirical connection is made between them. It would have been interesting to explore variation over time in the parties’ positions, as well as the parties’ attention to the different aspects of the national question, and to observe how such changes impact the weight of related attitudes on vote choice. At the beginning of the introduction, the authors state that the relationship between parties and voters is “reciprocal” (4). Readers are thus led to expect a clearer connection between the behaviour of citizens and parties.
There are also some minor methodological issues in the interpretation of the results of the authors’ analyses. In several parts of the book, they interpret regression coefficients on variables that should not be interpreted. These include the effects of variables that are not significant and the coefficients on variables controlling for variables that come later in the causal sequence. The authors notably interpret demographic variables in models controlling for variables such as ideology and cynicism. In such models, the non-demographic variables constitute “bad controls”, and thus coefficients on demographics should not be interpreted.
Overall, The National Question is an impressive comparison of the electoral politics of the national question in Quebec and Scotland. It provides in-depth analyses of the extent to which the varied facets of this question have permeated party positions and citizens’ voting behaviour in both regions. It is an essential read for anyone who is interested in either region or in other cases of sub-state nationalism.
