Linguistic rights and the borders of political identity

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Giacomo Lemoli, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse.

This paper revisits a classic question for government and policy scholars: how is the behaviour of cultural or ethnic groups influenced by the formal institutions that regulate their rights? While the literature has shown that state-sanctioned discrimination or forced assimilation to a majority identity often produces backlash among minority members, the paper studies the consequences of accepting minority rights, focusing on one important dimension, the status of the minority language. The author explores a regional language reform in post-transition Spain: in 1986, the Spanish province of Navarra assigned municipalities to one of three language zones, each with a different degree of normalisation of the Basque language in the public sphere. The paper analyses the effects of differentiated language rights on the identity choices of Basque and Spanish speakers, the definition of group boundaries and forms of political participation to date. With granular sub-municipal data and a geographical RDD, it is found that the crossing of the administrative boundary of the bilingual zone increases the vote shares of Basque nationalist parties at the expense of traditional Spanish parties. Using a Difference-in-Differences design and historical electoral data, the author then studies how the reform induced divergent patterns in voting behaviour in once politically homogeneous areas. Exploring causal mechanisms, the paper finds evidence of attempts to reshape public space by translating street names into Basque. Finally, it traces identity choices across generations with data on Basque names and surnames in municipal electoral lists and language preference surveys.

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