This paper studies party competition under secession crises in advanced democracies. It puts a special focus on Quebec, Scotland and Catalonia to analyse how a party or parties use secession as a competition issue, how other parties respond and what are the consequences for regional party systems. Using computerised content analysis of parliamentary debates, this work finds that under secession crises, most parties are forced to talk about territorial integrity and that party systems polarise in the territorial dimension. However, parties can adopt different strategies to alter the salience and position on the issue. Most surprisingly, this paper shows that secessionist and centralist parties are not always the ones that emphasise secession the most and that parties do not always position at the extremes.
