Support for the use of military force to prevent secession: the case of Scottish independence
By: Jaroslav Tir, Shane P Singh, Xiaojun Li
Abstract:Ìý
Secessions are often understood to be inherently war-prone, perhaps because individuals have been found to strongly support governments using military force to defend their country's territorial integrity. To assess the extent to which individuals actually support using military force against co-citizens, in a survey experiment we randomly assign English and Welsh respondents to a control condition listing the United Kingdom's constituent countries and overseas territories or to a treatment scenario describing a unilateral Scottish secession. Asked about the extent to which they would support the use of military force to defend the U.K.'s territorial integrity, respondents are significantly more supportive of the use of force in the control condition. Further analyses reveal men to be more hawkish than women in the control condition, while the gender gap disappears in the Scotland condition, with men's attitudes significantly mollified. Nationalist respondents, meanwhile, are relatively supportive of the use of force regardless of treatment status. Our findings thus caution that the literature's argument about the war proneness of secessions may be overly reliant on post hoc government decisions rather than ex ante individual-level attitudes.