The Political Consequences of Independence Referenda in Liberal Democracies: Quebec, Scotland, and Catalonia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the extent to which independence referenda that do not lead to independence affect the politics of national minority communities and the larger multinational states that contain them. Using the cases of Quebec, Scotland, and Catalonia, the article analyzes the consequences of independence referenda for the nationalist party that initiated them, for popular support for the independence option, and for the state’s practices for managing nationalist movements. The article concludes that the party promoting independence in a referendum is not harmed, at least in the short term, by its defeat; that independence referenda do not generate significant long-term support for the independence option, although they help to legitimize that option; and that referenda do not prompt governments to move toward more accommodation of nationalist movements, unless they formally commit to a specific change during the campaign. The nature and extent of the impact of independence referenda on the politics of national minority communities and the multinational states are largely determined by the dynamics of referendum campaigns, where the competition between nationalist and unionist forces plays out.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".