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There have been over 60 votes on independence since the first referendums were held in 1860. The majority of these were held immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. Fundamentally, one can distinguish between three types of referendums – those held in democracies, those held in autocracies and those held in countries that fall in the intersection between the two. Using Fuzzy Sets Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this chapter shows that most independence referendums are in countries that fall between the two. The reasons for this are many but some stand out. The independence votes are about politics, law, legitimacy, but above all, they are about the symbolism of national unity. These votes are often rigged and seem pointless from a democratic point of view. They are not. Rather, they are part of what anthropologists call “the politics of meaning”. To use the terminology of Murrey Edelman, referendums …