This Fellowship will support a research agenda that is a novel approach to the study of nations and nationalism. This project investigates the "national movements" of stateless nations. It places intranational movement variation at the center of its analysis. Placing variance at the center of the research agenda is more likely to provide us with the most significant advances in our understanding of independentist nationalism, and of its counterparts, autonomist nationalism and federalist nationalism. Specifically, this project studies the conditions under which new nationalist political parties get successfully established within the institutionalized sphere of parliamentary politics and electoral competition, with a focus on the role played by networks of sociological nationalism. In selecting cases, this project will seek to have cases where there is variation in the independent variable: low vs. high levels of the presence of sociological nationalism in civil society, and a corresponding variation in the dependent variable: success or failure in the founding of autonomist, independent, or federalist nationalist political parties. The universe of cases covered by this project includes the nationalist parties of Quebec, Catalonia, Puerto Rico, Scotland, the Basque Country, Corsica, etc. The project will develop a data set mapping the extent of the presence of sociological nationalism in the civil society in the selected cases. The Fellowship will also support original fieldwork in the selected cases. Ultimately, the broader research agenda this Fellowship supports will help to illuminate the relevance of national movements for state stability and state maintenance.
