Making Nationalists out of Frenchmen?: Substate Nationalism in Corsica

What is it about?

This article analyzes the electoral performance of the nationalist movement in Corsica. First, we ran an ecological analysis of a new dataset, including observations from all Corsican towns for all regional elections from 1992 to 2004. Second, we complemented the ecological findings with individual-level data. Our results show that the classical combination of economic-based and identity factors that account well for nationalist voting is conditioned in the Corsican case by the existence of two specific phenomena: the tendency of the nationalist movement to experience internal divisions and party splitting, and the extraordinary electoral resilience of local notables, the traditional French-loyal political leaders on the island.

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