Secessionism

Secessionism is primarily driven by political identity according to a new study using a very large global dataset. 

It also sheds light on why the U.S., which has significant secessionist leanings that caused the U.S. Civil War but remain alive and well today, and deep seated racial divides, has a weak welfare state and an anti-government spending bent.

This said, there is the question of who seeks to secede from whom. If there is a division in political identity, either group could seek to secede. Conventional wisdom is that the more affluent side seeks to secede, which holds true in the cases of Spain and Italy, but not in the U.K. (both before and after the formation of the Republic of Ireland) or the U.S.

This paper analyzes whether the propensity to secede by subnational regions responds mostly to differences in income per capita or to distinct identities. We explore this question in a quantitative political economy model where people's willingness to finance a public good depends on their income and identity. 

Using high-resolution economic and linguistic data for the entire globe, we predict the propensity to secede of 3,003 subnational regions in 173 countries. We validate the model-based predictions with data on secessionist movements, state fragility, regional autonomy, and conflict, as well as with an application to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Counterfactual analysis strongly suggests that identity trumps income in determining a region's propensity to secede. Removing identity differences reduces the average support for secession from 7.5% to 0.6% of the population.

Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín & Ömer Özak, "Is Secessionism Mostly About Income or Identity? A Global Analysis of 3,003 Subnational Regions" NBER Working Paper 30428 (September 2022).