Beca Leonardo · Fundación BBVA · 2025–2027
DRIFT
Decentralization, Reforms, Institutions, and the Formation of Territorial Preferences
Why it matters
Over the last half century, decentralization reforms have reshaped how power is shared in most democracies. Yet what we know about citizens' territorial preferences — their views on how authority should be divided between central and regional governments — comes mostly from places with strong centre–periphery conflicts, such as Scotland, Catalonia or Flanders, and from surveys that capture those views at a single point in time.
DRIFT looks at how these preferences are formed, and at when they stay put and when they change, across very different institutional and social settings.
Three goals
- A theory of territorial preferences. Map the economic, political and cultural forces behind the full range of views, from centralizers to decentralizers — including those content with the status quo.
- A comparative survey with experiments. Combine public-opinion research with survey experiments to separate the identity, ideological and material roots of these preferences.
- History as evidence. Build a new dataset of canton-level results from the 1969 French regionalization referendum — never used before — to study territorial preferences through real votes, in one of Europe's most centralized states.
Featured paper
Decentralization by Design, Democracy by Default: De Gaulle's 1969 Gambit
with Filippo Liviano D'Arcangelo (PhD student, UC3M) · work in progress
France is the textbook case of a centralized state, where the centre–periphery conflict is assumed to have faded long ago. The 1969 referendum puts that assumption to the test. De Gaulle bundled the creation of regions with a vote of confidence in himself, forcing voters to weigh their territorial preferences against their support for the President.
Using canton-level results (N = 4,302) linked to the Converse panel survey of French voters, and extending Graham and Svolik (2020) with a regionalist dimension, the paper shows how the centre–periphery divide shaped the vote even in one of Europe's most centralized countries.
On 27 April 1969, French voters rejected the reform and de Gaulle resigned the next day. As the map shows, the result was far from uniform: parts of the west, the east, the Massif Central and Corsica voted Yes, while most of the country said No.