Does decentralisation turn minority parties into secessionists? Insights from Eastern and Western Europe

Abstract

Whereas Western European governments have devolved political authority to minority regions, governments in Eastern Europe have shied away from using decentralisation to accommodate national minorities. This article assesses how these differences affect the secessionism of minority parties. The theoretical section argues that both programmatic accommodation (i.e. when governments adopt positions in favour of decentralisation) and institutional accommodation (i.e. when governments create regions that correspond to the settlement areas of minority groups and transfer authority to the regional level) increase the likelihood that minority parties will adopt secessionist positions. Regression analyses of 83 European minority parties show that a higher level of programmatic and institutional accommodation is indeed associated with a higher likelihood of secessionism. However, increases in programmatic accommodation between 2011 and 2017 in fact decrease the likelihood that minority parties turn secessionist when using the method of first differences. Future research should therefore collect panel data on minority parties’ positions.

Keywords:

• Secession
• decentralisation
• territorial autonomy
• party politics
• Eastern Europe
• national minorities

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the workshop on ‘The Political Economy of Inequality and Conflict’, University of Konstanz, 16–17 July 2015, at the Department of Political Science at the University of Basel, 22 March 2018, at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) in Chicago, 7 April 2018 and at the Working Group on European Politics of the University of California at Berkeley, 2 December 2019. We thank participants at these events, and Mike Medeiros, David Knoll, and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments. We further thank Arjan Schakel for sharing the most recent up-date of the Regional Authority Index data and Daniel Bochsler for sharing data from the Index of Electability project. Holger Döring was a stellar source of support in exporting and transforming the expert survey data and Johanna Washington provided excellent research assistance. Both authors contributed equally to the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VIK7OQ, reference number UNF:6:NpgjwZLzjvKjod4Fu4716A== [fileUNF].

Notes

1 Counties (județe) are the equivalents of regions in Romania. Székely Land includes the counties of Covasna/Kovászna, Harghita/Hargita, and the eastern and central part of Mureș/Maros county.

2 Accordingly, we include cases of irredentism in our definition of secessionism. We use the terms secessionist and separatist interchangeably.

3 The selection of groups and parties is explained in more detail in section three.

4 We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing out this further strategic consideration.

5 It is worth noting that during the 19^th century, Western European states (prominently France and Spain) have also sought to avoid integrating regions by splitting national minorities’ homelands or by integrating them into larger territorial units (Kymlicka 2001: 75–6).

6 The EPR-ETH project categorises ‘an ethnic group as politically relevant if at least one political organization claims to represent it in national politics, or if its members are subjected to state-led political discrimination’ (Cederman et al. 2010: 99). Countries were classified as democratic if rated ‘free’ or ‘partly free’ on the Freedom House index and classified as a ‘democracy’ by the Polity IV project. The initial selection of countries was done in 2011 and was maintained for the second round of the expert survey, even though democracy had deteriorated in Turkey and Ukraine. The selected countries are: Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, France, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, UK and Ukraine.

7 Minority parties that had been included in 2011 were included in 2017 even if they no longer passed this criterion of relevance.

8 Appendix A (Supplementary material) presents an overview of the variables.

9 The regional authority dataset does not cover Moldova and the Ukraine and we lose three parties when estimating the impact of regional self-rule on the likelihood of secession.

10 The five dimensions measure the following: ‘(1) Institutional depth: the extent to which a regional government is autonomous rather than deconcentrated (0–3); (2) Policy scope: the range of policies for which a regional government is responsible (0–4); (3) Fiscal autonomy: the extent to which a regional government can independently tax its population (0–4); (4) Borrow autonomy: The extent to which a regional government can borrow (0–3); (5) Representation: the extent to which a region is endowed with an independent legislature and executive (0–4)’ (Codebook Regional Authority Index (RAI) 2015: 3–4).

11 The variable coinciding is missing for Corsicans in France, Basques in Spain and Catholics in Northern Ireland because we lack data on whether a majority of group members is concentrated in an institutionalized region. We therefore lose five parties when estimating the impact of coinciding region on the likelihood of secession.

12 The following parties became secessionist: Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya, Candidatura d’Unitat Popular, Bloque Nacionalista Galego and Alternativa Galega de Esquerda in Spain, Hrvatska stranka prava Bosne i Hercegovine in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Demokratska Partija Albanaca/Partia Demokratike Shqiptare in Serbia. The variable secessionist shift is missing for Socijalistička partija (Bosnia) because the party was not included in the EPAC 2011 edition and it did not split from any of the parties previously included, so we cannot assess whether the party shifted its position.

13 Figure C1 in Appendix C (Supplementary material) displays changes in programmatic accommodation between 2011 and 2017 by country.

14 Appendix E (Supplementary material) presents the summary statistics.

15 Predicted probabilities in Table 4 were calculated by the command prvalue from the SPost package in Stata (Long and Freese 2006).

16 We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing us to this possible interpretation.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Cluster of Excellence 16, Cultural Foundations of Social Integration.

Notes on contributors

Edina Szöcsik

Edina Szöcsik is a senior research fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on the roles of ethnicity and nationalism in electoral competition in young and mature democracies. Her articles have appeared in the European Journal of Political Research, Party Politics and West European Politics among others.

Christina Isabel Zuber

Christina Isabel Zuber is Assistant Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Her background is in comparative politics and her research is located in the fields of comparative federalism and territorial politics, party politics and migration studies. Her articles have appeared in Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, Party Politics and Regional Studies.