Description
Since 1990, there has been a marked increase in the frequency of independence and regional sovereignty referendums around the world. Direct democracy of this type is often, although perhaps problematically, touted as an effective way to resolve contentious issues of national, regional, or territorial sovereignty. But what about polities that have no legal right or feasible route to holding a binding referendum on these issues? In these cases, the organising of unofficial or illegal referendums is a surprisingly common tactic that is increasingly employed by protest groups, social movements, or regional political parties to raise awareness, mobilise supporters, and pressure central governments into granting concessions. Despite their increasing frequency, the effect of these specific forms of protest democracy remains empirically poorly understood.
This paper addresses the puzzle of why unofficial sovereignty referendums seem to be growing in popularity by examining how effective they are as protest and mobilisation events. To do this, I use Interrupted Time Series (ITS) modelling to compare the empirical effect on national issue salience of the recent unofficial referendums in Catalonia, Veneto, and Lombardy to the effect of the ‘official’ Scottish independence referendum, and to the salience of other regional sovereignty movements where no such referendum has occurred. The findings of this paper suggest that unofficial referendums can be an effective way to accentuate the national salience of regional sovereignty in the short-term and, in some cases, in the medium to long-term. Any medium to long-term elevation in issue salience, however, appears to be dependent on several factors. I outline some of the most plausible factors behind medium to long-term saliency increases and conclude by proposing useful avenues for future research into both referendum effects and the tactics of regional sovereignty movements.
