Regional Political Cultures: Diversity, the State, and the Perception of Difference

Political culture research originally assumed that political cultures existed at the level of the nation-state, and that any variations occurring below the level of the state served as a source of risk to the state. That state-centric assumption absolved researchers of identifying how one might identify political cultures. At the same time, a vibrant body of research on regionalism and regional political cultures offers different methods of explaining and measuring cultures that exist below the level of the state. This article offers a first examination of how we might identify the different territorial forms of regional political cultures, whether they have different features and routes, and if so what the consequences of this are for how we understand diversity within the state. It argues that there are two types of regional political cultures—hard and soft varieties—and that while measures of objective difference can help to identify different forms of regional political cultures, subjective elements, including the perception of difference, can offer a meaningful form of boundary-making around regional political cultures.