ABSTRACT
Unlike many other scholarly fields covered in this Handbook, political party scholarship has been relatively slow in responding to changed understandings of state structures resulting from federalism and regionalism. Whilst territorial politics has been on the agenda of political science for at least the last 30 years (albeit in the background – see Loughlin, 2009; Keating, 2009), comparative studies of stateless nationalist and regionalist parties began to emerge in the 1990s (de Winter and Türsan, 1998), whilst conceptual analyses of state-wide party adaptation to federal, regionalized and multi-level states have only just surfaced in the last decade. Why is this? Why did party scholars come so late to the territorial politics table?
