Governing Diverse Polities: How Regional Language Shapes Political Attitudes
Research on democratization, state-building and community formation stresses the importance of language and identity for building cohesive polities and fostering democratic legitimacy; and research shown that regionalism and regional identity have consequences for people’s political behavior and attitudes, including anti-democratic sentiment. Language is a major aspect of regional distinctiveness, and linguistic and psychological research has shown that language can shape people’s perceptions and the salience of different social conflicts, such as ethnic divides. Consequently, national governments have historically viewed language policy as integral for building and maintaining stable institutions. This project aims to link individuals’ regional language use to their political attitudes and behavior. Specifically, I will seek to test how the use of a regional language shapes a) attitudes towards democratic institutions at the regional, national and European levels, b) preferences over the territorial structure of governance and c) voting behavior. This is a mixed methods study, combining a survey experiment and qualitative interviews. Both the experiment and the interviews will focus on Catalonia as an exemplary case of a region in which regional identity is consistently salient and tension between the region and the central state is historically persistent.
“I am both honored and excited to have received the RSA early career grant for my research on regional language use and political attitudes. I have been working on developing this project, which merges many of my research interests and advances my research agenda, for several years. Regional language use is an understudied aspect of regional distinctiveness, and I hope that The results of this study will help in understanding the heterogenous needs of citizens living in these regionally-diverse countries, and provide potential solutions for those wishing to govern linguistically and culturally diverse states.”
Principal Investigator: Kaitlin Alper
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Danish Centre for Welfare Studies (DaWS) at the University of Southern Denmark. In addition to teaching courses, I am involved in a project focused on the Politics of Insecurity led by Dr. Peter Starke. My primary research interests are in comparative welfare states and social policy, economic and social inequality, and the political economy of multilevel governance and decentralization in advanced industrial democracies. My work has been published in Social Forces and West European Politics. More information about my research can be found here.