Identity, Redistribution, and Secession. Experimental Evidence from Catalonia

What explains preferences for decentralization, inter-regional redistribution and independence in multi-tiered countries? To what extent are citizens in linguistically or ethnically distinct regions motivated by redistribution concerns or identity-oriented concerns? Previous research has not tried to empirically distinguish these concerns, nor does it focus on measuring and explaining preferences in the regions where such decentralization concerns are most salient. To remedy this, we use survey evidence with an embedded experiment from the region of Catalonia in Spain to test these competing theories. We focus on detailed evidence from Catalonia as it is a region where secessionist demands have intensified in the last two years, and in which identity and political redistribution factors have been deemed as the most relevant to explain these demands. We test for identity and political economic factors by randomly priming Catalan identity for some, randomly informing others of Catalonia’s true regional wealth position in Spain, and giving both information and a cultural prime to others. We find limited impacts of information on regional redistribution preferences, that priming Catalan identity has no significant impact on the probability of voting in favor of independence in a secessionist referendum, but that such primes to significantly turn weakly identified Catalans against independence. The results have implications for understanding how citizens in ethnically or linguistically distinct regions come to form preferences about policy issues that affect the entire polity.