Electoral Chairs’ Seminars – 15 June

The Correlates of Secessionist Party Support, 1945-2021

Alex B. Rivard (Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship)

Where there exists a host of research examining secessionist party ideology (Massetti 2009; Massetti and Schakel 2015, 2016), on how parties manage the presence of a regional cleavage (Alonso et al. 2013; Basile 2013, 2016; Meguid 2005, 2008; Zons 2016), and on how changes in autonomy affect statewide regionalist parties (Meguid 2015), the current research leaves the success of independence-seeking parties as an open and relatively unanswered empirical question apart from work done by Sorens (2004, 2005, 2012). This paper seeks to fill this gap by examining the correlates of support for clearly-identified secessionist parties in Western Europe and North America since 1945. To do so, I rely on a bespoke electoral dataset that traces secessionist party support in subnational and national elections. In total, it accounts for over 1,200 elections and includes economic (e.g., unemployment), sociographic (e.g., migrant stock), and political (e.g., conservative share of the legislature) variables. It further stresses the need for region-specific, non-national-level variables.

Contact Semih Çakır if you would like to participate in the seminar.

This content has been updated on 14 June 2022 at 6 h 35 min.