Competition and Coordination between Secessionist Political Parties in Europe

Secessionist parties in Europe are ubiquitous, and their activities are often visible. However, the ways in which they interact, in what geographic spaces they interact, and the drivers of their interactions are not well known. To what extent do secessionist political parties in Europe compete against each other in pursuing their objectives? To what extent do they coordinate with one another? What do their communications look like across subnational regions, countries, and the European Union? What explains parties’ tendencies to compete against or coordinate with each other in a competitive democratic space? We use an original dataset of independence-seeking political parties and network and regression analyses to begin to address these questions. Perhaps counterintuitively, we find that parties’ communications with one another are more coordinative than competitive. We also observe that geography is an organizing principle for interparty competition and coordination. Finally, we find evidence that moderate political ideology and European Free Alliance (EFA) membership are associated with higher interparty collaboration and lower interparty competition, while public support has a negative effect on interparty competition. Although our research is exploratory, these findings have important implications for regional communities, host states, and the European Union.