Abstract

This study focuses on the relationship between secessionist tendencies, which are understood to be the desire of a set of certain individuals to cease being part of an ingroup in order to form a new class or identity, and perceived conflict within the original affiliation. The working hypothesis is that there is a positive correlation between these variables. Two hundred and twenty-four volunteer participants responded to five questionnaires that measured the main variables of this study and supplied feedback through other questionnaires related to social identity: regionalism (a form of ethnocentrism), group identification, and essentialism. The main results indicate that secessionism is positively associated with the perception of conflict between the ingroup and the superordinate ingroup, and that both variables in turn correlate with the other variables studied. The results are discussed in terms of the possible causal determination between the variables drawn from the aforementioned empirical evidence and the supporting theory. © 2021 The European Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences.