Paper Titles & Abstracts

This paper aims to explore the role of Stateless Nationalist and Regionalist Parties (SNRP) in the link between immigration and the territorial dimension of the centre-periphery cleavage. Immigration issues in minority nations have become a growing area of research. However, the role of SNRP has been largely overlooked. This is despite the fact that SNRPs are crucial actors given their role within the maintenance of the territorial cleavage. After reviewing the literature and proposing an analytical framework, the paper defends the argument that the distribution of powers on immigration in multi-level governance structures may be the key to understand the relations between SNRPs and the centre on the one hand, and the SNRPs' stances on immigration on the other. It does so by exploring SNRP in two minority nations where the distribution of powers is different; low, for the case of Scotland, and high, for the case of Quebec. This comparative qualitative analysis takes the last three legislative periods in both regions and concludes that the distribution of powers helps to understand the relationship between the centre and the periphery, but not the stances on immigration. In the conclusion the paper suggests a need for further research that explores the relationship between diverging stances on immigration policies between sub-state and state actors and examines these in new cases.