Regional Resources and Democratic Secessionism

Published: 19 November 2019| Version 1 | DOI: 10.17632/y956cwykjr.1
Contributors:
Kai Gehring, Stephan Schneider

Description

Replication dataset for the paper "Regional Resources and Democratic Secessionism" in the Journal of Public Economics. See also www.kai-gehring.net for earlier versions and a link to the published paper. Abstract: Although resources have been shown to influence secessionist conflicts in developing countries, their effect in established democracies has largely been neglected. We integrate regional resources and inter-regional transfers in a model of democratic secession, and show that relative regional income correlates positively with secessionist party success in a large panel of regions. To establish causality, our difference-in-differences and triple-differences designs exploit that Scotland and Wales both feature separatist parties, but only an independent Scotland would profit from oil discoveries off its coast. We document an economically and statistically significant positive effect of regional resources and rule out plausible alternative explanations.

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Institutions

Universitat Zurich

Categories

Politics, Economics, International Political Economy, Political Economy, Comparative Politics

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