Public Attitudes to National and Regional Citizenship in a Unitary Federal State: The Case of Austria

Abstract

The transnational CANS project, which includes case studies of three regions in Austria, seeks to explore whether, and to what extent, citizenship — as manifested in political participation as well as in social solidarity — has become ‘de-nationalized’, or scaled across multiple levels. This question, though rarely posed, appears increasingly appropriate as, challenged by globalization and European integration, the scope of the nation-state has been redefined, and as new regional decision-making bodies have been established in many European countries since the 1990s (see Marks et al. 2008). The CANS project investigates the question of how people in (selected) European regions negotiate multi-level politics against the background of these changes and whether, and to what extent, they favour a recalibration of political participation and of the state’s welfare functions between the different territorial levels, especially between the state and the regional level.