Regionalists against secession: The political economy of territory in advanced democracies

Nationalism and Ethnic Politics

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 325-360

  Sorens, Jason ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AUTONOMY; DEMOCRACY; POLITICAL ECONOMY; REGIONALISM; SECESSIONISM; STATISTICAL ANALYSIS; TERRITORIALITY; VOTING BEHAVIOR;

EID: 49949115599     PISSN: 13537113     EISSN: 15572986     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13537110802289670     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and the Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)
2. Nicholas Sambanis and Annalisa Zinn, "From Protest to Violence: An Analysis of Conflict Escalation with an Application to Self-Determination Movements," unpublished manuscript (2006), Yale University Department of Political Science
3. James D. Fearon, "Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer than Others?," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2004), pp. 275-302
4. Barbara F. Walter, "Building Reputation: Why Governments Fight Some Separatists but Not Others," American Journal of Political Science Vol. 50, No. 2 (2006), pp. 313-330.
5. Saul Newman, Ethnoregional Conflict in Democracies: Mostly Ballots, Rarely Bullets (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
6. Stéphane Dion, "Why Is Secession Difficult in Well-Established Democracies? Lessons from Quebec," The British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 26 (1996), pp. 269-283.
7. The electoral system can of course discourage the formation of small parties.
8. Stephen Saideman and R. William Ayres, "Is Separatism as Contagious as the Common Cold or as Cancer? Testing the International and Domestic Determinants of Secessionism," Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2000), pp. 92-114.
9. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
10. Some examples include: Anthony Birch, "Minority Nationalist Movements and Theories of Political Integration," World Politics, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1978), pp. 325-344
11. Margaret Levi and Michael Hechter, "A Rational Choice Approach to the Rise and Decline of Ethnoregional Political Parties," in Edward A. Tiryakian and Ronald Rogowski (eds.), New Nationalisms of the Developed West: Toward Explanation (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985)
12. Joseph R. Rudolph, Jr. and Robert J. Thompson, "Ethnoterritorial Movements and the Policy Process," Comparative Politics, April 1985, pp. 291-311
13. Huri Türsan, "Ethnoregionalist Parties as Ethnic Entrepreneurs," in Lieven de Winter and Huri Türsan (eds.), Regionalist Parties in Western Europe (London: Routledge, 1998)
14. Michael Keating, Nations Against the State: The New Politics of Nationalism in Quebec, Catalonia, and Scotland, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2002)
15. Pieter Van Houten and James D. Fearon, "The Politicization of Cultural and Economic Difference," Fifth meeting of the Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes (LiCEP), Stanford University, 10-11 May 2002.
16. For exceptions see: Jo Buelens and Ruth Van Dyck, "Regionalist Parties in French-Speaking Belgium: The Rassemblement Wallon and the Front Démocratique dzes Francophones," in Lieven de Winter and Huri Türsan (eds.), Regionalist Parties in Western Europe (London: Routledge, 1998)
17. and Xosé-Manoel Núñez, "Autonomist Regionalism Within the Spanish State," Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3&4 (1999), pp. 121-141.
18. Hudson Meadwell, "A Rational Choice Approach to Political Regionalism," Comparative Politics, July 1991, pp. 401-421.
19. Roger Levy, Scottish Nationalism at the Crossroads (Edinburgh, Scotland: Scottish Academic Press, 1990).
20. Of these, the CiU is undoubtedly the most moderate, but they voted as a bloc for an ERC-sponsored motion proclaiming Catalonia's right to secede from Spain. Juan Marcet and Jordi Argelaguet, "Nationalist Parties in Catalonia: Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya and Esquerra Republicana," in Lieven de Winter and Huri Türsan (eds.), Regionalist Parties in Western Europe (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 80.
21. Michael Keating, State and Regional Nationalism: Territorial Politics and the European State (New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1988), p. 212.
22. Erin Jenne, "A Bargaining Theory ofMinority Demands: Explaining the Dog That Did Not Bite in 1990s Yugoslavia," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 48 (2004), pp. 729-754.
23. Anna Cento Bull and Mark Gilbert, The Lega Nord and the Northern Question in Italian Politics (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001), p. 26.
24. Some of the post-Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have also legalized minority nationalist parties. During the period under investigation, however, most of these countries did not have stable party systems. Electoral volatility may interfere with our ability to derive accurate results from a sample including these countries, specifically by engendering heteroskedasticity in the residuals.
25. If the majority fears minority domination, then autonomism can become relevant. Consider the Shi'a majority in Iraq and their tentative support for federalism.
26. Obviously, autonomous institutions - and therefore nationalist politics - are largely irrelevant for geographically scattered minorities, who can usually at best hope for nondiscrimination and political and social inclusion. In some cases, countries have used institutions of "personal autonomy" for such groups.
27. Jason Sorens, "Globalization, Secessionism, and Autonomy," Electoral Studies, Vol. 23 (2004), pp. 727-752.
28. Initial tests separating "independentist" and "radical-autonomist" parties did not reveal substantial differences in results. I have also tried counting the CiU as a regionalist rather than secessionist party, with no appreciable difference in results. The full list of secessionist and regionalist parties is available from the author on request.
29. Other "micro-separatist" movements include municipal secession movements in the United States in cities such as Los Angeles.
30. Jason Sorens, "The Cross-Sectional Determinants of Secessionism in Advanced Democracies," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2005), pp. 304-326.
31. Allan H. Meltzer and Scott F. Richard, "A Rational Theory of the Size of Government," Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 89, No. 5 (1981), pp. 914-927.
32. An implication of this logic is that in autocracies, fiscal redistribution may work differently, and richer regions may not necessarily be more secessionist and poorer ones more regionalist.
33. Alberto Alesina, Enrico Spolaore, and Romain Wacziarg, "Economic Integration and Political Disintegration," The American Economic Review, Vol. 90, No. 5 (2000), pp. 1276-1296.
34. This relationship is standard in gravity models of interstate trade. See for instance Erik Gartzke and Quan Li, "Measure for Measure: Concept Operationalization and the Trade Interdependence-Conflict Debate," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 40, No. 5 (2003), pp. 553-571.
35. If Quebec gains access to NAFTA, then of course independence may not create many new trade barriers, and Quebec independence would be relatively costless on this dimension. Hudson Meadwell and Pierre Martin, "Economic Integration and the Politics of Independence," Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1996), pp. 67-87.
36. Geographical separationmay also enhancemilitary defensibility, butmost of the regions in the dataset could rationally expect to free-ride on the United States' collective defense umbrella through NATO if they were to become independent. Additionally, use of military force to obtain independence in the first place is explicitly rejected by the vast majority of secessionist movements in advanced democracies.
37. Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
38. Dana Ott, Small Is Democratic: An Examination of State Size and Democratic Development (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000).
39. It would be ideal to use a measure of trade dependence of the region on the rest of the country to test the general relationship between trade dependence and secessionism, but such data are not available for most country years.
40. Diffusion of separatism across international borders has been almost universally rejected by political scientists, except where an ethnic group straddles borders (Saideman and Ayres, 2000, p. 103).
41. Daniel Treisman, After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
42. An alternative way of operationalizing this variable is as a continuous measure, weighing each secessionistmovement by its percentage of the vote. When this alternative variable is used, it is always statistically significant but improves model fit only slightly or not at all over the alternative presented here.
43. UPN vote share is counted as "regionalist" only at autonomous community elections, because the evidence indicates that the bulk of their support at Spanish elections comes from the PP element.
44. The region of Brussels presents a difficult case. I do not interpret the Flemish parties contesting elections there as "Brussels secessionists." In the secessionist regressions, Brussels is dropped like all capital regions. However, the Flemish nationalists clearly do want to incorporate Brussels into a future Flemish state. Therefore, I have used Flemish nationalist vote shares on this independent variable to predict regionalist support in Brussels.
45. Patrick Bolton and Gerard Roland, "The Breakup of Nations: A Political Economy Analysis," Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 112, No. 4 (1997), pp. 1057-1090.
46. Another possibility is that a new nationalist movement affects the "opportunity structure" faced by others elsewhere. The more such movements there are, the weaker the central government will be and the more concessions it will need to make. However, one might expect that the more peripheral movements a central government faces, the less likely it will be to make concessions to any of them, fearing setting a precedent (Toft, 2003; Walter, 2006). Moreover, this argument cannot explain why the results below show that the number of other regionalist movements does not affect regionalist vote share, while the number of secessionists does.
47. Gary Cox, Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
48. Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera, "Effective' Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to Western Europe," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 12 (1979), pp. 3-27.
49. It might be better to use an institutional measure of system proportionality, such as average district magnitude (ADM) for each region. However, ADM would not take into account other institutional features, such as the French two-round majority system, which encourages sincere voting and extreme multipartism in the first round, which is the round I use for the data. Since endogeneity is likely to bias downward only the coefficient on the theoretically uninteresting lagged vote share variables, it is probably a price worth paying for a clean, unified variable.
50. Dawn Brancati, "Decentralization: Fueling the Fire or Dampening the Flames of Ethnic Conflict and Secessionism?," International Organization, Vol. 60 (2006), pp. 651-685
51. Dawn Brancati, "The Origins and Strength of Regional Parties," The British Journal of Political Sciencen (forthcoming).
52. This lagged variable is slightly different from a true lagged dependent variable in that for any election t it measures the percentage of the vote received at election t-1 by the parties contesting election t. Thus, if a secessionist or regionalist party disappears between elections, its vote share is not counted in the lagged vote share variable for election t, unless no secessionist/regionalist party exists at all in election t.
53. Harold D. Clarke, "The Parti Quebecois and Sources of Partisan Realignment in Contemporary Quebec," Journal of Politics, Vol. 45, No. 1 (1983), pp. 64-85.
54. Australian states, Austrian länder, Belgian regions, Canadian provinces, Danish amter, and the Faroe Islands dependency, Finnish läänit (Lappi and Aaland only), French régions, German länder, Greek peripheries, Italian regioni, Japanese prefectures (Hokkaido and Okinawa only), Dutch provincies Norwegian fylker, Portuguese regiões (Norte, Algarve, Azores, and Madeira only), Spanish comunidades autónomas, Swedish län, Swiss cantons, the four nations of the United Kingdom, and the 50 United States plus the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Data and data sources are available from the author on request.
55. For some non-EU countries such as Australia, Japan, Norway, and Switzerland, regional economic accounts do not go back before the 1990s. For the United States, by contrast, state economic series go back to 1970, and all election years since then are included. No election years after 2000 are included for any country.
56. Wooldridge recommends logging the dependent variable in a Tobit regression when necessary to approach a normal distribution in the dependent variable: This procedure does indeed reduce heteroskedasticity in the residuals and improves overallmodel fit, but because it reduces the interpretability of the coefficients without changing the results of significance tests on most individual variables, these results are not reported here. Jeffrey M. Wooldridge, Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 520.
57. The panel setup is the most appropriate framework to test the effects of regional elections, because in the cross-section data countrywide and regional elections are frequently averaged for different years (in Canada, for instance, countrywide and provincial elections usually do not happen at the same time).
58. Valencia scores "zero" on "colonization," because its secessionist parties are autochthonous; nevertheless, here too one could argue that Valencian regionalism is a backlash against perceived Catalan-secessionist "colonization".
59. Francophones in wealthy Brussels more strongly oppose Flemish independence than they do fiscal federalism.
60. After the 1996 election, the League even spent two years in an ill-fated detour into trying to create parallel institutions for an independent Padania (Cento Bull and Gilbert, 2001, pp. 105-138).
61. Antón Losada, "National Identity and Self-Government: The Galician Case," Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3 & 4 (1999), pp. 143-163.
62. Francisco J. Llera, "Basque Polarization: Between Autonomy and Independence," Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3 & 4 (1999), pp. 101-119.
63. The more radical nationalists in EE opposed the merger with the Socialists and joined EA.
64. The 1970s splits in the major Belgian political parties reflected divisions over linguistic issues, not territorial aspirations. Lieven De Winter, "The Volksunie and the Dilemma Between Policy Success and Electoral Survival in Flanders," in Lieven de Winter and Huri Türsan (eds.), Regionalist Parties in Western Europe (London: Routledge, 1998).
65. Alesina, Spolaore, and Wacziarg, op. cit.
66. Brancati, 2006, p. 674.
67. Elise Giuliano, "Secessionism from the Bottom Up: Democratization, Nationalism, and Local Accountability in the Russian Transition," World Politics, Vol. 58, No. 2 (2006).