Voting under the threat of secession: accommodation vs. repression

Vincent Anesi and Philippe De Donder

No 2011/40, Working Papers from Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB)

Abstract: We build a simple model of secession crises where a majority of voters may wish to accommodate the minority in order to prevent a secession attempt. We first show the existence of a majority voting equilibrium, where the median voter is decisive and most prefers a government’s type that is biased in favor of the minority. We then propose a measure of the secession risk at equilibrium and perform the comparative static analysis of the equilibrium policy location and of the secession risk with respect to several parameters: the cultural distinctiveness of the two regions, the relative weight attached by voters to economic (centripetal) -as opposed to (centrifugal) ideological- factors, the relative size of the minority region, the (exogenous) probability that a secession attempt is successful, and the intra-regional heterogeneity of preferences.

Keywords: Majority voting; secession risk; cultural distinctiveness; conflict; overlapping regional preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Voting under the Threat of Secession: Accommodation vs. Repression (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2011-40

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