Disentangling blurring boundaries: The institutional/extra-institutional relation in nationalist movements

Nationalist movements involve sustained collective action by networks of actors making claims against the state to obtain legitimate rights over territory. Often, and especially in democratic contexts, these networks include both institutional and non-institutional actors. However, the relationship between the two has been regrettably overlooked despite literature has argued that they are mutually dependent actors in shaping politics.Moments of critical events, like referendums on secession, are interesting for highlighting the strong interdependence among actors. The Scottish and Catalan referendums make excellent cases for examining the relationships between political parties and social movement organizations as they are information-rich cases that manifest a massive civil society engagement.In my research I analyze these relationships during the referendum campaigns and following the vote. This dissertation indeed argues that some referendums unfold as transformative events and are therefore able to impact the relations among actors well beyond the events themselves. As in other eventful campaigns, interactions within extra-institutional arenas and beyond were intensified and transformed. To what extent and how exactly did pro-independence parties and social movement organizations interact during the referendum campaigns? Under which conditions were they more or less connected to each other? And if it is true that transformative events produce enduring relational effects, how did these relationships evolve after the vote?To answer these questions, I have adopted a historical comparative design based on secondary sources, documentary research and semi-structured interviews. The longitudinal, cross-case comparison takes the 1980s as starting point of the analysis to then focus on the 2014 Scottish referendum, the 2017 Catalan one and their aftermaths. While secondary sources are used to retrace the reciprocal behavior of nationalist parties and social movement organizations over the past decades, the analysis of original materials and interviews with pro-independence activists and politicians aims at shedding light on party-SMO inter-organizational links around the referendums and their evolution since then.