Martín Portos

Waving goodbye? The determinants of autonomism and secessionism in Western Europe

ABSTRACT Waving goodbye? The determinants of autonomism and secessionism in Western Europe. Regional Studies. This paper sheds light on the main aggregate-level determinants of electoral support for regionalist parties across 10 Western European countries. A region being relatively richer than the country to which it belongs is associated with higher electoral support for regionalist parties only to the extent that the region is culturally differentiated. This hypothesis is substantiated theoretically, tested empirically and found to hold in the form of a strong and significant interaction effect between cultural and economic variables. This result, omitted in previous studies, implies a profound change in the interpretation of the role of income and cultural differences in explaining support for regionalism, for both autonomist and separatist parties.

VOICING OUTRAGE UNEVENLY: DEMOCRATIC DISSATISFACTION, NONPARTICIPATION, AND PARTICIPATION FREQUENCY IN THE 15-M CAMPAIGN*

This article explores frequencies of participation and nonparticipation in the 15-M protest campaign in Spain. Given the nature of this campaign, we focus on democratic dissatisfaction. Our findings suggest that, relative to nonparticipants, democratic dissatisfaction is significantly associated with multiple-time participation, but not with one-time participation. In other words, those who participated only once are not substantially more dissatisfied than those who did not participate. This is remarkable because the “indignados” label and the slogan “Real Democracy Now!” suggest that democratic discontent is a central factor uniting 15-M challengers. Relying on a general survey with questions on different frequencies of participation in the 15-M campaign and on qualitative evidence from two separate rounds of interviewing, we show that not all those who participated, when compared to nonparticipants, were in fact that outraged.