This paper looks at decentralisation as an institutional solution for curbing secessionist pressures by making potentially seceding regions strictly better off by staying in the union. We show that a bottom-up decentralisation reform, where single regions that can opt to assume or not stronger fiscal responsibilities on the basis of bilateral negotiations with the central government, may be more successful in avoiding instability and a secessionist conflict than more standard top-down decentralisation, where the central government assigns identical fiscal powers to all regions. The example of the decentralisation process in Spain over the last 40 years illustrates the relevance of the institutional pattern we analyse in the paper.

本文将权力下放视为遏制分离主义压力的制度性解决方案，方法是通过留在工会使可能分离的地区变得更好。我们表明，自下而上的权力下放改革，在与中央政府的双边谈判的基础上，单个地区可以选择承担或不承担更强的财政责任，可能比更标准的自上而下更成功地避免不稳定和分离主义冲突。降低权力下放，中央政府向所有地区分配相同的财政权力。过去 40 年西班牙权力下放过程的例子说明了我们在本文中分析的制度模式的相关性。