Redistribution and Rhetoric in Sovereignty Referendums

• In Event: Sources of Destabilization in Europe

Abstract

Is the parallelism of systemic crisis events and sovereignty demands coincidental or systematic? How are bids for sovereignty on the national and supranational levels linked? I argue that regional heterogeneity in distributive preferences across states and substate regions exacerbates the effect of systemic crises in the European Union. As the increased salience of economic concerns is not adequately addressed, demand for sovereignty across both the national and the supranational levels increases. I analyze observational data of sovereignty referendums between 1970 and 2019 using a regression discontinuity design with economic crises as treatment variable on. I show that crises are strongly correlated with referendums, while the direction of the proposed sovereignty transfer is conditioned on the strength of local identities.

Author

• Friederike Luise Kelle, Harvard University