Population and Productivity: When Secession is an Option
POLITICAL SCIENCES |

Population and Productivity: When Secession is an Option

BOCCONI UNIVERSITY'S MASSIMO MORELLI, AS PART OF A LARGER ERC FUNDED PROJECT, HAS DEVELOPED A MODEL THAT HIGHLIGHTS THE FORCES BEHIND THE DRIVE FOR INDEPENDENCE IN REGIONS SUCH AS CATALONIA AND KURDISTAN

The Roman Empire and Czechoslovakia succeeded in peacefully splitting into two parts, while the collapses of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were accompanied by bloody conflicts on whether to split or stay together. In the former cases the two halves were similarly large and wealthy, with some differences in social norms or ethnicity. In the latter, size and wealth varied a lot, with the richer and more productive parts supporting separation and the other regions opposing it.
 
More generally, peaceful secessions are likely to occur in presence of groups similar in size and productivity, but differing in cultural preferences of some kind. Conflict is, instead, a possible outcome when there is a mismatch between relative size and relative surplus contribution of the minority group, a new study concludes.
 

 
In order to understand the secessionist process, as part of a larger ERC-funded project, Massimo Morelli (Bocconi’s Department of Social and Political Sciences) and colleagues have developed a dynamic game model in which groups differ in size, economic productivity and preferences over public goods such as culture, language, legislation or other identity-related collective decisions.
 
The group in power selects the public good and the surplus sharing and makes a proposal to the minority group, that can be either union, or peaceful secession or conflict. A peaceful secession ends the game, while the union choice implies that the game will be repeated in the future, with the threat of conflict that can induce the ruling group to bargain and grant larger transfers to the opposition. While the group in power is by definition happy with the status quo, the minority group has an incentive to secede when it’s discriminated or contributes a disproportionate share of the national surplus. When the mismatch between size (small) and productivity (large) is high, bargaining does not work, and conflict may arise, and last potentially a long time.
 
At the opposite extreme, i.e. when the minority group is very large and very poor in terms of contribution, it is the group in power that would like to “push them out”, which determines first a discrimination strategy followed by a separatist war.
 
When size and productivity are more proportional, on the other hand, either staying together is particularly valuable because public good sharing is important, in which case the State will function as a peaceful union of groups, or else, if the cultural differences determine significant differences in cultural preferences, then a peaceful split should be expected.
 
«Catalonia and Kurdistan are important recent examples of situations in which an incentive to secede exists (minority size but productive group) and where the bargaining process is trying to avert the risk of conflict». Prof. Morelli says. «In advanced democracies, there are more legal enforcements and commitment power by States, which make it more likely to transform a secession incentive in a quest for renegotiation of autonomy levels. In weaker States like Iraq the most important difference is the difficulty to make credible commitments to surplus sharing, making the probability of conflict slightly higher».
 
Joan Esteban, Sabine Flamand, Massimo Morelli and Dominic Rohner, The Survival and Demise of the State: A Dynamic Theory of Secessions.

by Fabio Todesco
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