The Politics of Flag Display: How Grassroots Mobilisation Shapes Political Resistance to Nation-Building

How do governments in minority regions with strong self-determination demands respond to assimilation efforts from the central state? National symbols, such as mandatory flag displays, are common tools used by states to assert authority and foster integration. This paper investigates non-compliance with such obligations in Catalonia, where many municipalities do not display the Spanish flag on town hall facades despite legal requirements. Drawing on original data from nearly one thousand municipalities between 2021 and 2024, we explore the drivers of this symbolic resistance. Contrary to expectations centred on elite strategy or state enforcement capacity, neither judicial orders nor contemporary party affiliation retain explanatory power once we control for voter preferences. Instead, the most robust drivers are localised, bottom-up, and historic. Most interestingly, we find that flag absence is overwhelmingly predicted by informal local independence referendums organised a decade earlier. After eliminating alternative mechanisms -- institutionalised path dependency, voter segmentation and current activist presence -- we hypothesise that this effect captures entrenched and enduring resistance norms within the local independence communities, which shift mayors' cost-benefit calculations. Notably, these effects are present for both secessionist and non-secessionist mayors, and for the latter, appear to override legal threats and amplify their sensitivity to local pro-independence support. These findings underscore that in deeply contested regions like Catalonia, the effectiveness of symbolic assimilation policies hinges less on formal authority or short-term elite manoeuvring, but rather localised social ecosystems.