Secessionism in Multicultural States: Does Sharing Power Prevent or Encourage It?* Abstract States worry greatly about secessionist movements and the ethno-political mobilizations

States worry greatly about secessionist movements and the ethno-political mobilizations that can give rise to them. Political scientists agree that the institutional framework within which identity groups interact powerfully determines the goals, violence, and trajectories of such movements. However, both small N and large N researchers disagree on the question of whether “power-sharing” arrangements, instead of repression, are more or less likely to mitigate threats of secessionist mobilizations by disaffected, regionally concentrated minority groups. Using the PSI modeling platform, a virtual country—Beita—was created, containing within it a disaffected, partially controlled, regionally concentrated minority. Using the tenets of constructivist identity theory as the basic driver for the algorithms controlling behavior by agents in the Beita “landscape,” the most popular theoretical positions on this issue were tested. Data from experiments involving hundreds of histories of Beita, run under modulated, controlled conditions, lend support to some of the more sophisticated interpretations of the effects of repression vs. responsive or representative types of power-sharing. While in the short run repression works to suppress ethno-political mobilization, it does not effectively reduce the threat of secession. Power-sharing can be more effective, but it also tends to encourage larger minority identitarian movements.