The rise of research on independence referendums
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/01925121211060651 |
| Author | Jean-Baptiste Harguindéguy,Enrique Sánchez Sánchez,Almudena Sánchez Sánchez,Alistair Cole |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Research Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/01925121211060651
International Political Science Review
2023, Vol. 44(4) 540 –556
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/01925121211060651
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The rise of research on
independence referendums
Jean-Baptiste Harguindéguy
Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain
Enrique Sánchez Sánchez
Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain
Almudena Sánchez Sánchez
Universidad a Distancia de Madrid, Spain
Alistair Cole
Baptist University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Abstract
This study consisted in undertaking a bibliographical search within the Web of Science Core Collection from
January 1900 to December 2020. A total of 637 publications were identified and divided into 9 sections
tackling successively the relevance of independence referendums, the biased authorship, the definition
of the phenomenon, the technical features of referendums, the elaboration of comparative datasets, the
legitimacy of these consultations, the drivers leading to the organisation of independence referendums,
the impact of referendums on settling ethnic violence and their capacity to favour state recognition. We
affirm that those publications have advanced our knowledge about independence referendums. We also
stress the persistence of a high fragmentation of authorship and approaches limiting the adoption of a
common vocabulary, validation methods and consistent datasets allowing the accumulation and replication
of analyses for establishing robust theories. In conclusion, we indicate some theoretical blind spots which
could constitute a future research agenda.
Keywords
literature review, PRISMA, referendum, independence, secession
Corresponding author:
Jean-Baptiste Harguindéguy, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Building 14, 4th floor, room 22, Ctra. de Utrera, km. 1,
Sevilla, 41013, Spain.
Email: jbhar@upo.es
1060651IPS0010.1177/01925121211060651International Political Science ReviewHarguindéguy et al.
research-article2022
Original Research Article
Harguindéguy et al. 541
Introduction
The recent organisation of independence referendums in Scotland (2014), Crimea (2014), Kurdistan
(2017), Catalonia (2017), New Caledonia (2018) and Bougainville (2019) has demonstrated that
the geopolitical map of the world is still evolving under the pressure of ethnonationalism. In all
these cases, independence referendums were proposed to overcome the conflict between two prin-
ciples. On the one hand, sovereign states have the legitimate right to protect their borders – as
recognised by article 2.4 of the Charter of the United Nations which guarantees the ‘territorial
integrity or political independence’ of its member countries. On the other hand, seceding sub-state
units usually invoke the Charter’s article 1.2 which affirms the ‘principle of equal rights and self-
determination of peoples’. Beyond the ideological orientation of the actors involved in independ-
ence referendums, electoral consultations must be handled with caution. As stressed by Horowitz
(2003), there is usually no possibility to step backwards after an independence referendum has
been held and its results have been implemented on the ground.
These developments have been reflected by the publication of several books, chapters and arti-
cles tackling secessionist dynamics in Europe and the rest of the world (Atkinson et al., 2021). The
first academic mention of independence referendums can be found in Mattern’s (1920) doctoral
thesis The Employment of the Plebiscite in the Determination of Sovereignty followed by the study
by Wambaugh (1933), Plebiscites Since the World War. This research line faded before being re-
activated in the late 1970s by the volume edited by Butler and Ranney (1978) entitled Referendums:
A Comparative Study of Practice and Theory. In the 1980s and 1990s, the independence referen-
dums in Quebec and in the former Soviet Union caught the attention of scholars like Farley (1986)
and Beigbeder (1994) who collectively transformed independence referendums into a mainstream
research object.
Nevertheless, the proliferation of analyses has increased the difficulty in understanding the
main positions within this academic field. The purpose of this review consists in providing an
intellectual map to help researchers find their way within the current state of the art. In order to
do so, this article followed the guidelines of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic
Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology.1 For doing so, we conducted a biblio-
graphical search through four combinations of keywords among the abstracts of articles, books,
book chapters and conference papers of the Web of Science Core Collection from January 1900
to December 2020.2
As a result, ‘independence and referendum’ produced 449 items, followed by ‘sovereignty and
referendum’ (177 items), ‘self-determination and referendum’ (65 items) and ‘secession and refer-
endum’ (63 items).3 After excluding 117 duplicates and irrelevant publications, the system pro-
duced a final list of 637 items in different languages.4 These items provided a useful starting point
for identifying additional references cited in our initial sample. Following the PRISMA outlines,
we classified these references into nine analytical categories. To elaborate some of these categories
we used the classical distinctions appearing in the literature. For the rest, we completed the picture
in a more inductive way by producing our own categories.
This article presents these findings. It is divided into nine sections tackling successively the
relevance of independence referendums, the authorship of studies on independence referendums,
the definition of the phenomenon, the technical features of referendums, the elaboration of data-
sets, the legitimacy of these consultations, the drivers leading to the organisation of independence
referendums, the impact of referendums on settling ethnic violence and their capacity to ease state
recognition. We conclude with several related theoretical reflections.
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