Support for Regionalisation in Federal Belgium: The Role of Political Socialization

Regionalization, in the form of a dispersion of political power away from national political centres to regional governments, has been a defining feature of European politics since the 1970s. The article focuses on how institutional regionalization changed citizens’ attitudes about the division of competences between the central and regional level. It argues that regional institutions and policies exert a socializing effect on citizens’ preference in favour of these institutions through a mechanism of adaptive preferences. First, attitudes are studied across cohorts in a single population to t... Mehr ...