"Love Thy Neighbour"? The Effect of Income and Language Differences on Votes for Municipal Secessions

Simon Lapointe

No 107, Working Papers from VATT Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: This paper studies voters' preferences on municipal borders in a setting with cohabiting linguistic communities. It takes advantage of unique data from referendum results in the Canadian province of Quebec in 2004, which allows a direct investigation of voter preferences. I find that differences in income and language affect the likelihood of secession. Notably, I also find that these effects are interdependent, suggesting that the support for a local secession is affected to some degree by out-group aversion. Finally, I find that voters are willing to pay additional taxes to live in their jurisdiction of choice.

Keywords: secession; diversity; voter behaviour; municipal mergers; Local public finance and provision of public services; D72; H73; H77; Kunnat ja hyvinvointialueet (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/154622

Related works:
Journal Article: “Love thy neighbour”? The effect of income and language differences on votes for municipal secessions (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fer:wpaper:107

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from VATT Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anita Niskanen ().