Contemporary democratic separatist movements: The politics of new state creation by referendum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is a comprehensive analysis of the conditions under which new states have been, and may be, created through exclusively democratic means. Existing literature explains the majority of such cases: those that occurred through the processes of decolonization, or through the break up of post-communist federations. However, we lack a general theory that can account for other such cases, most typified by independence movements in places such as Catalonia, Scotland, and Quebec. This dissertation supplies that theory, as well as empirical analyses of hypotheses derived therefrom, and offers explanations for the actions of states, regions, and voters undergoing such a process. The first chapter introduces the concept of democratic separatism, describes its process, compares it to other mechanisms for new state creation, and investigates the history of the phenomenon. It finds that, outside of decolonization and post-communist federal disintegration, the achievement of internationally-recognized sovereignty through democratic separatism is a rare phenomenon. The second chapter proposes a set of attributes that, when simultaneously present, constitute a sufficient condition for the emergence of successful democratic separatist movements. The third chapter considers the strategic interaction that occurs between a nation-state, and a democratic separatist movement therein. At question is the holding and endorsing of a popular referendum on the question of secession. I propose a framework for how we may interpret the motivations and interests behind certain actions that may be taken by the state or the movement. The concluding fourth chapter focuses on individual voters as the unit of analysis and presents evidence that regional identity remains a strong correlate for supporting a separatist movement, and that alternatives proposed in extant literature (namely, economic inequality and supranational integration) are not.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".