Resumen de Secesión, autogobierno y modelos de democracia

Daniel Casal, Beatriz Viladrich

• español

  El trabajo analiza la relación entre los modelos de autogobierno y los mecanismos de secesión. Para ello el paper parte de un análisis teórico de los conceptos de sece- sión, autodeterminación y la materialización que se realiza de ellos tanto en el Derecho Internacional como los sistemas políticos nacionales estableciendo una modelización de su ejercicio, en función del grado de intervención de las instituciones centrales, en dos tipos: autónoma o tutelada. Adicionalmente se analizan siete casos: Escocia, Que- bec, Groenlandia, Islas Feroe, Nueva Caledonia, Aruba y Sint Maarten y se estudia si el diseño y rendimiento de sus instituciones de autogobierno los convierte en sistemas mayoritarios o consociativos. A partir de estas dos primeras aproximaciones el paper establece la relación entre el diseño de los sistemas políticos subnacionales y el modelo de secesión existente determinando como conclusión preliminar que existen elemen- tos para poder asociar vías diferentes de acceso de autonomía al diseño de sistemas políticos subnacionales.

• English

  The main research question of the paper is to find out if the design of the political system of a subnational entity, in countries that contemplate the possibility of initiating a secession process, determines a model of independence more or less supervised from the central level of government.

  To answer the main question, the paper chooses seven extraordinarily relevant cases: Scotland, Aruba, Quebec, Sint Maarten, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and New Caledonia.

  These are territories that have self-government institutions and that are part of countries in which the possibility of activating a secession process is contemplated by the political system of which they are part.

  The research builds a theoretical framework based in the first place on the conceptual delimitation and recognition of the right to secession, which may have the following nature:

  Constitutional (when it is thus recognized in the constitutional pact of a country) Awarded (when it is recognized by a normative instrument with legal rank) or Intergovernmental (when it has its origin in a pact between different levels of government). Additionally, the research defines defines each of the elements that characterize the models of majority or consociative democracy according to the methodology proposed by Lijphart (2016).

  To determine whether the model of democracy that defines the institutions of self- government, from each of the selected case studies, the paper defines four dimensions that are subdivided into 7 indicators:

  Cabinet type: area in which the degree of concentration of the executive power in mono-color or coalition governments is analyzed.

  Executive-Legislative Balance: where it is studied which institution leads the political system of self-government through indicators such as the parliamentary election of the executive, the existence of mechanisms for the withdrawal of parliamentary trust or the possibility of dissolving the legislature by the cabinet.

  The party system: by determining the majority or consociational bias of the system from the calculation of the Effective Number of Parliamentary Parties (NEPP) using the system of Laakso and Taagepera (1979) as well as the classification parameters of Blondel (1968) and Sartori (1976) The electoral system: determining whether it is proportional or majority.

  The research shows that the self-government institutions of Quebec and Scotland resemble a Westminster model of democracy whose main characteristic is the majority bias in the functioning of its political system. For their part, Greenland, Aruba and Sint Maarten present more characteristic elements of a consociative democracy model characterized by the pact between multiple actors as a fundamental dimension of the performance of the political system.