Secessionism in Multicultural States: Does Sharing Power Prevent or Encourage It?* Abstract States worry greatly about secessionist movements and the ethno-political mobilizations that can give rise to them. Political scientists agree that the institutional framework within which identity groups interact powerfully determines the goals, violence, and trajectories of such movements. However, both small N and large N researchers disagree on the question of whether “power-sharing” arrangements, instead of repression, are more or less likely to mitigate threats of secessionist mobilizations by disaffected, regionally concentrated minority groups. Using the PS-I modeling platform, a virtual country—Beita—was created, containing within it a disaffected, partially controlled, regionally concentrated minority. Using the tenets of constructivist identity theory as the basic driver for the algorithms controlling behavior by agents in the Beita “landscape,” the most popular theoretical positions on this issue were tested. Data from experiments involving hundreds of histories of Beita, run under modulated, controlled conditions, lend support to some of the more sophisticated interpretations of the effects of repression vs. responsive or representative types of power-sharing. While in the short run repression works to suppress ethno-political mobilization, it does not effectively reduce the threat of secession. Power-sharing can be more effective, but it also tends to encourage larger minority identitarian movements. Ian S. Lustick Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania Dan Miodownik Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania Roy J. Eidelson Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict University of Pennsylvania Please send comments to the authors at [email protected], (215) 898-5719, Fax: (215) 215-573-2073. Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania, 206 Stiteler Hall, Philadelphia 19104-6215. * The authors would like to acknowledge the crucial contributions provided by Vladimir Dergachev and Ben Eidelson in the software development and applications used in this research.Secessionism in Multicultural States 2 Lustick, Miodownik, and Eidelson Correlations, Cases, Comparisons, and the Study of Institutional Effects on Secessionism In a world of states and dominated by states it is unsurprising that the maintenance of state boundaries would appear as a vital problem and that “state contraction,” “secession,” or “partition” would be figured, by most scholars and politicians, as evidence of public policy failure or as desperately exercised options of last resort. To be sure, in the 1990s some scholars revived interest in territorial self-determination via partition of existing states as a sometimes useful policy option for individual states and for the international community. Against a background of severe political instability in the Balkans, central Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union, it has been suggested that some political conflicts might be managed best by “rightsizing” states, i.e. adjusting their boundaries or creating new states (O’Leary, Lustick, and Callaghy 2001; Hoppe 1998). Others have emphasized the occasional necessity for forcible partitions and even population transfers to achieve a correspondence between ethnopolitical or sectarian allegiances and the contours of states legitimized by them (Kaufmann 1998; Tullberg and Tullberg 1997). On balance, however, the bulk of the scholarly and public policy community continues to oppose such approaches on moral, legal, practical, and other grounds. Instead they direct much more attention to how conflict and especially violent conflict can be managed while protecting existing state boundaries (Carley 1997; Horowitz 1985, 588-592 and 1997, 435; Kumar 1997; Sambanis 2000). Many factors, considered independently or in interaction, have been prominent in recent studies of the etiology of secessionism. They include the implications of economic advantage/disadvantage, topography, world region, demographic patterns, globalization, cultural distinctiveness, inter-group antipathy, type of identities in conflict, and outside intervention by irredentist or culturally related powers. In this paper, however, we focus specifically on one key thread in this sprawling conversation—the relationship between institutionalized empowerment of potentially secessionist groups and the appearance of secessionism.Secessionism in Multicultural States 3 Lustick, Miodownik, and Eidelson Indeed it can be argued that the single most popular line of argument offered by scholars to policy makers has been to suggest political and institutional arrangements to satisfy demands by whatever regional, religious, ethnic, or other groups with secession-potential appear to threaten the integrity of the existing territorial states. Under this rubric various techniques and approaches have been elaborated, including affirmative action, multicultural liberalism, federalism, autonomy, cantonal arrangements, or power-sharing (Danspeckgruber 1996; Gurr 2000, 151-177; Horowitz 1985, 601-680; Hurst 1990 and 1998; Lapidoth 1996; Lijphart 1977 and 1985; McGarry and O’Leary 1993; Sambanis 2000; Tiryakian 1998). The general view here is that by responding positively and integratively, if only partially, to the demands of disgruntled minorities, secessionism can be abated and secession prevented while preserving the predominance and stability of the central state. By making government more responsive to the concerns of disgruntled minorities, potentially secessionist groups will be encouraged to feel confident of representation and protection for their most vital concerns. Such institutional responses by the central state are deemed capable, if designed and implemented properly, of reducing the intensity of separatist demands by those who otherwise might make them. In Hirschman terms, the impetus for exit is to be blunted by providing opportunities for voice and reasons for loyalty (Hirschmann 1970). However the opposite view is also strongly argued—that creating autonomous, federal, or otherwise devolved institutions of self-government or self-administration, especially if they allow regionally concentrated groups to mobilize within them, are liable to contribute to secessionism by affording elites and groups the