The dog that didn’t bark: on the effect of the Great Recession on the surge of secessionism

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between the economic turmoil generated by the Great Recession and the increase of secessionism. Some authors have stressed that the Great Recession triggered changes in territorial preferences and, in the context of a conflict between the centre and the periphery, fuelled secessionism as a radical shift of the institutional setup. Nevertheless, other researchers have remarked that a recession may enhance the status quo bias and decrease the likelihood of changes. Our paper aims at contributing to this debate by analysing the case of Catalonia. We use an aggregate and an individual-level empirical design to explore the relationship between the deterioration of the economic situation and the increase of preferences for secession among the Catalan population. The findings from the analysis of our empirical models do not support the hypothesis that the effects of the Great Recession had any significant impact on political preferences in Catalonia.

KEYWORDS:

• Great Recession
• unemployment
• secession
• economic crisis
• Catalonia
• Spain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Xavier Cuadras-Morató http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7420-0334

Toni Rodon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0546-4475

Notes

1 Campanella, Edoardo “Why secessionism is on the rise in Europe”, 14 August 2014. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2014/08/secession-scotland-catalonia-referendum-europe/. See also Hallindan, Conn “How Ethnic Tensions and Economic Crisis Have Strengthened Europe’s Secession Movements”, 9 April 2014. https://www.thenation.com/article/how-ethnic-tensions-and-economic-crisis-have-strengthened-europes-secession-movements/ and, for a different view, Dardanelli, Paolo “Recession is only one explanation for the drive for secession”, 24 November 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/nov/24/recession-only-one-explanation-secession.

2 Since both estimations provide similar results, from this point onwards we will focus on the latter.

3 We use four surveys published in 2006 (8,400 cases) and five in 2015 (10,000 cases).

4 If we move up or down the 15 cases threshold results are still robust.

5 Table C in the Appendix provides details of all political parties and their stance on the independence debate.

6 These two parties competed separately in the 2006 election and formed the bulk of JxS, the main pro-secession coalition in the 2015 election.

7 Regions correspond to vegueries, administrative territorial jurisdictions that represent symbolic areas of reference. There are 7 vegueries. If we employ other geographical areas (such as provinces) results are robust.

8 One reason for this inconsistency is that the vote share received by pro-sovereign parties in 2006 is positively correlated with pro-sovereign mayors. When we remove the second variable, the coefficient of the vote share received by pro-sovereign parties is always positive and significant. All the other results are robust.

9 Results can be seen in the Appendix (Table G). For the sake of simplicity, we have only included the interactions with the main economic indicators in our principal empirical specification (the remaining interactions show the same pattern).

10 Logit models include several control variables. Operationalization and full estimates are included in the Appendix (Tables H-L).

Additional information

Funding

Cuadras-Morató’s work was funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spanish Government) under grants ECO2014-55555-P and SEV-2015-0563.