The enduring electoral success of populist parties across Europe and the increasing opportunities they have gained to access government in recent years bring once more into relief the question of whether populism and democracy are fully compatible. In this article we show how, despite playing different roles in government within very different political systems, and despite the numerous constraints placed upon them (for instance, EU membership, international law and domestic checks and balances), populist parties consistently pursued policies that clashed with fundamental tenets of liberal democracy. In particular, the idea that the power of the majority must be limited and restrained, the sanctity of individual rights and the principle of the division of powers have all come under threat in contemporary Europe. This has contributed to the continuing erosion of the liberal consensus, which has provided one of the fundamental foundations of the European project from its start.

Increasing droughts and water shortages are intensifying the need for residential water conservation. We identify and classify 24 water conservation studies using the information–motivation–behavioral skills (IMB) model by categorizing interventions based on content and water conservation effectiveness. This synthesis revealed several insights. First, all of the interventions used information, motivation, and/or behavioral skills, suggesting that water conservation interventions can be interpreted within the IMB framework. Second, interventions with two or more IMB components led to reductions in water usage, but the average effect sizes between different types of interventions were similar and there was a considerable range around these averages. To the extent that intervention effectiveness is driven by populations lacking specific IMB components, more elicitation research to identify gaps in specific populations could support greater effectiveness. Designing interventions explicitly with the IMB model would facilitate comparability across studies and could support a better understanding of water conservation interventions.

This paper introduces the key concepts used in this special issuecenter, periphery, and vertical bargainingand inquires why some national groups within democratic states demand outright independence, while others mobilize for regional autonomy and still others settle for even less. It then specifies a theoretical framework that tries to explain cross-sectional differences and temporal changes in both peripheral demands and central responses. The building blocks of that framework include cultural distinctiveness, credibility of the exit threat and central dependence on the periphery. As an empirical illustration, the paper discusses the case of the Bernese Jura in Switzerland, and then briefly introduces the contributions to this special issue.

The study of secession generally stresses the causal influence of cultural identities, political preferences or ecological factors. Whereas these different views are often considered to be mutually exclusive, this paper proposes a two-stage model in which they are complementary. We posit that cultural identities matter for explaining secessionism, but not because of primordial attachments.Rather, religious and linguistic groups matter because their members are imbued with cultural legacies that lead to distinct political preferences over welfare statism. Further, ecological constraints such as geography and topography affect social interaction with like-minded individuals. On the basis of both these political preferences and ecological constraints, individuals then make rational choices about the desirability of secession. Instrumental considerations are therefore crucial in explaining the decision to secede, but not in a conventional pocketbook manner. To examine this theory, we analyze the 2013 referendum on the secession of the Jura Bernois region from the canton of Berne in Switzerland, using municipal level census and referendum data. The results lend support to the theory and suggest one way in which the politics of identity, based on factors like language and religion, can be fused with the politics of interest (preferences for more or less state intervention into the polity and economy) to better understand group behavior.Keywords: Secession, referendum, welfare statism, cultural identities, ecological constraints, rational choice 2 Secession is a phenomenon that affects both the developing countries (e.g., Georgia, China, Russia, Ukraine, Nigeria) as well as developed ones (e.g., Spain, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy; Dion, 1996;Sorens, 2012). In several European democracies, like the United Kingdom and Spain (Muñoz and Guinjoan, 2013;Muñoz and Tormos, 2014), secessionist demands are accompanied by calls for a referendum to decide the question once and for all. In others, such as France, Belgium, and Italy, secession is at least sporadically invoked in political discourse when demanding more territorial group rights or fewer payments to poorer areas (Lindsey, 2012;Coppieters and Huysseune, 2002).Despite these developments in European politics, scholars continue to disagree over the relative importance of different mechanisms for understanding secession. Some argue that cultural factors, such as emotions, affect, and social identity, are key to explaining nationalism and separatism (e.g. Smith, 1986;Connor, 1994;Petersen, 2002), whereas others think that they can best be understood in terms of rational action (e.g. Buchanan and Faith, 1987;Wittman, 1991;Bolton and Roland, 1997;Bookman, 1992;Collier and Hoeffler, 2002;Sorens, 2012). Still others emphasize structural constraints on individual decision-making through geographically constrained social networks (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967;Jenkins, 1986;Rutherford et al., 2014). Thus whereas some scholars see secession as largely a matter of the he...

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