Is Decentralization “Glue” or “Solvent” for National Unity?

Of course, as already mentioned, one key important missing link in the argument is the degree of regional concentration of those who are “different.” Other potentially critical explanatory factors include the level of development, the nature and effectiveness of political institutions, and, of course, the degree and nature of decentralization. [...] Although we review each of the countries included in the “universe” set out in Table 2 briefly in the remainder of this section, in the balance of the paper we concentrate for the most part on the relatively small subset of these countries that combine three characteristics. [...] In the remainder of this section, we comment briefly on most of the countries listed in Table 2, in the order listed there, both to explain at least in part the way we have filled in the cells in that table and to draw out some common characteristics found in a number of countries. [...] In recent years, the Turkish government has, in an attempt to accommodate some of the wishes of the large Kurdish population in southeastern Turkey, loosened to at least a small extent the heavy restraints it had imposed on the use of the Kurdish language. [...] However, the causal link between the oil price and the vote for the SNP is certainly not evident in either voting or survey data if one compares the evolution of the vote share of the SNP and nationalist sentiments with the price of oil (Green 2005).