Voting, public goods and violence

Abstract: The disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia in the last ten years of the 20th century has received much attention. Apart from this, referenda on secession have been held in Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, Quebec in Canada and East Timor in Indonesia. On the contrary, there has been amove towards greater integration in Europe since the Second World War, there was the German reunification and the unification of Yemen, both in 1990. These major event sand developments have also attracted the attention of economists, and right now a considerable amount of research is been performed, Bolton, Roland and Spolaore (1996) and Alesina (2003) have conducted surveys of this research.The incentives of individuals to form jurisdictions are central to the questions that are addressed in this thesis. Consecutively, the roles of public good provision, of intergovernmental transfers and of violence are discussed. A microeconomic approach to study this is used throughout this thesis.Reviewing the literature from this perspective, several topics can be found that have not received sufficient attention. The chapters in this thesis discuss several of these topics. In Part I, consisting of Chapters 2, 3 and 4, individuals face a trade-off between on the one hand the benefits of country size for public good provision, and on the other hand the costs of country size in terms of influence on political decision making. In Part II, containing Chapter 5, a model of local public good provision is studied. In Part III, consisting of Chapter 6, a dynamic model is used to study the interplay of violence and secessionism.