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Existing explanations of individual preferences for decentralisation and secession focus on collective identity, economic considerations and party politics. This paper contributes to this literature by showing that preferences for fiscal and political decentralisation are also driven by concern about the quality of government in the face of corruption. It makes two claims. Firstly, information on national‐level corruption decreases satisfaction with national politicians, and subsequently increases preferences for decentralisation and secession. Secondly, information on regional‐level corruption pushes citizens of highly corrupt regions to prefer national retrenchment and unitary states. The effects of this political compensation mechanism crosscut national identities and involve regions that are not ethnically or economically different from the core. We test our argument using a survey experiment in Spain and confirm its cross‐national generalisability with data from the European Values Study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses whether economic voting plays any role in a parliamentary, decentralized polity. Decentralization is argued to blur lines of responsibility and confuse voters about whom to blame for poor economic performance at the national and regional levels. National and Regional Economic Voting (NEV and REV, respectively) are tested in Catalonia (Spain). The initial empirical test suggests that only NEV takes place in this region. Four hypotheses are considered to explain REV’s absence: blame-shifting, blinding nationalism, coalition government, and misinformation regarding Policy Responsibility Distribution across tiers of government. Using reasonable counterfactuals and Bayesian techniques, the first three hypotheses are dismissed, whereas the last is confirmed. The results emphasize the informational requirements behind the economic voting theory. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]