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Publications
Publications (68)
The capacity of the left–right scale to summarize most political issues can be challenged by the salience of the center–periphery cleavage. However, the existing literature does not agree on whether both attitudinal dimensions are related and, if so, to what extent. In this paper, we argue that both axes can have a dependency relationship, going fr...
This paper analyzes the role of different origins to news media in selective exposure. We rely on a unique web-tracking online dataset from Spain to identify points of access to news outlets and study the influence of direct navigation and news-referred platforms (i.e., from Facebook and Google) on selective exposure. We also explore cross-level in...
Since Riker and Ordeshook (1968) first modified the voter utility function to include “duty” as one of the terms, civic duty has been characterized as “the psychological benefit derived from following the injunctive norm of voting” (Gerber & Rogers, 2009, p. 181). Research has provided strong evidence that “people who believe that all citizens have...
The characteristics of participatory institutions can be articulated in three main dimensions: input, process and output. The common assumption is that a dependency relationship exists, with process serving as a mediator between input and output. This paper puts the model to a rare empirical test drawing on a unique dataset of 70 Spanish advisory c...
What happens to the proposals generated by participatory processes? One of the key aspects of participatory processes that has been the subject of rare systematic analysis and comparison is the fate of their outputs: their policy proposals. Which specific factors explain whether these proposals are accepted, rejected or transformed by public author...
The significant rise in the number of populist radical right (PRR) parties has not been accompanied by a parallel interest in the consequences that these parties may have on public opinion. The limited range of attitudes that the literature has considered so far can be broadened to include political correctness (PC), given the increasing attacks on...
While research on the relationship between conspiratorial beliefs and populist attitudes has expanded over the years, concerns about causality in said relationship have not been successfully addressed. This research uses a two-pronged methodology combining observational and experimental data to put to empirical test the possibility that conspirator...
Despite the alleged increasing importance given to politicians’ personalities, the similarities and differences between citizens and politicians regarding their personality traits have been insufficiently studied. This research analyses the personality similarities and differences between citizens and politicians in Spain across party allegiances a...
What makes believers in COVID-19-related conspiratorial stories different from the usual conspiracy theorists? To date, evidence on conspiratorial beliefs about COVID-19 is scant and it focuses on only a few countries. Moreover, it overlooks political and ideological factors, which might well help in the endeavour of halting misperceptions about th...
While research concludes that populist leaders stand out for their “dark” personalities, studies on the psychological underpinnings of citizens’ populist attitudes are scant and inconclusive, with some agreement on the association between disagreeableness and populist attitudes. By bringing the Dark Triad personality traits of narcissism, psychopat...
There is a wide academic agreement on the existence of two different types of citizenship norms (“dutiful” and “engaged”), along with a generalized conviction about the prevalence of “engaged” norms among the young cohorts. These conclusions rely on a questionnaire battery that is omnipresent in the most important public opinion surveys and which n...
Both policymakers and scholars disagree about the effects and suitability of citizenship education standalone courses. Extant evidence about their effects is mixed and inconclusive. This article exploits the discontinuities generated by changes in Spanish education policies to identify the long-term effects of civic education on multiple outputs us...
The literature on elites focuses on two main phenomena: differences within elites and links between politicians and citizens. The present chapter applies this schema to the study of politicians’ personalities. As for elite differentiation, previous literature has established that right-wing politicians are more extroverted and conscientious than th...
The topic of gender differences in the propensity to vote has been a central theme in political behavior studies for more than seventy years. When trying to explain why the turnout gender gap has shrunk over the last few decades, some scholars have claimed that this might be due to the fact that women are more dutiful than men; however, no study to...
We know that many people feel that they have a duty to vote in elections, but we know little about what other civic duties they believe they ought to fulfill. In this study, we address the question of whether people feel that they have both a duty to vote and to be informed. We use an original Canadian survey which includes questions about whether...
This paper examines the impact of economic conditions on participatory democracy. It analyses whether economic crises affect the types of proposals that emerge from local participatory processes and the fate of these proposals. Focusing on more than 500 proposals that emerged from 34 participatory processes in Spain between 2007 and 2011, our study...
Negative emotions are becoming increasingly important in framing studies, but they are seldom considered as primary research objects. This leaves a series of questions unanswered, such as whether framing effects on emotions are direct or conditioned to individuals’ previous attitudes, or whether such effects are different for specific negative emot...
Goal: Compare the performance of primary health centers managed by the public sector (ICS), the third sector (Hospitals) or by small private organizations known as EBAs. Design: Multidimensional comparative analysis. We follow a quasi-experimental logic comparing primary health centers managed by EBAs with other centers managed by the public sector...
Recent research about the decision to vote or abstain finds a causal effect of social networks and social pressure. Yet this literature does not examine how this social pressure is exerted and by whom. This study aims at correcting these shortcomings. Using a two-wave panel survey conducted in Canada, we distinguish between the pressure exerted by...
Existing literature assumes a link between voting and individuals’ political socialization, but no study has explored how political upbringing affects the most important attitudinal predictor of turnout: the duty to vote. Following previous research about the formation of attitudes related to the electoral process and social norms, this study focus...
This chapter addresses the nature and origin of Spanish MPs’ political motivations to enter politics in general and their party in particular, paying special attention to political socialization agencies and processes. Spanish representatives mostly refer to their will to serve the public as the reason to get involved in politics, which fits the “v...
How have local participatory processes been affected by the grim economic, social and political crisis that has afflicted Spain since 2008? While other consequences of the crisis have been widely discussed, hardly any attention has been paid to this issue. To try and address the question we used a data base of citizens’ proposals received in local...
Challenger parties might have an advantage online compared to mainstream parties, since digital technologies increase their visibility at a low cost and connect them with niche audiences. Previous research has examined this phenomenon focusing on parties’ use of the Internet, yet we need to focus on voters’ behavior to quantify the effect. To this...
Demonstrations have become more visible across Europe since the Great Recession. To clarify the connection between crisis and protest, we open the black box of crisis-related grievances, suggesting a typology for this subjective phenomenon and addressing the mediating role of emotions on protest. Using panel data, we explore the dimensionality of t...
The moral and political nature of the belief that voting is a duty suggests that it is based on more abstract attitudes, acquired previously, such as support for one’s political community and democracy. It is also plausibly related to the country’s strength
of democracy and homogeneity, which moderate the effect of political support. We test these...
Theories of voter turnout pay increasing attention to ethical and social motives of voting, yet the empirical foundations of such perspectives are still scarce. In this chapter, we present the results of a laboratory experiment, conducted in two different countries, in which we manipulate the social conditions under which the elections take place....
The gender gap in political ambition is an important explanation for the absence of women in legislative assemblies. However, previous research on this matter is limited by two facts: it is conducted mostly in the United States and does not pay much attention to cultural and institutional factors. In this article, we test the extent to which establ...
The moral and political nature of the belief that voting is a duty suggests that it is based on more abstract attitudes, acquired previously, such as support for one’s political community and democracy. It is also plausibly related to the country’s strength of democracy and homogeneity, which moderate the effect of political support. We test these...
Some respondents of online surveys click responses at random. Screeners or instructional manipulation checks (IMC) have become
customary for identifying this strong form of satisficing. This research first analyzes the factors that condition IMC failures
using an online panel survey carried out in Spain (2011–2015). Our data show that the probabili...
Prior research on civic duty has focused on national elections, believed to be the most salient. Evidence on turnout gaps between election levels suggests that it is relevant to inquire whether people feel that they have the same duty to vote in national, subnational, and supranational elections. The article investigates this phenomenon, comparing...
One of the aspects of participatory processes that have rarely been the subject of systematic comparison is the fate of their outputs: their policy proposals. We know very little about the factors that affect whether these proposals are accepted, rejected or transformed. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we offer a theoretical model that ai...
This article investigates the recent so-called Spanish Revolution of 2011 with a view to understanding what it reveals about the current relationship between protest and electoral modes of participation. Theories of “disaffeccted radicalism” that grew up following the 1960s period of civil unrest strongly advocated the view that protest activity bo...
Online version (published on September the 26th 2014) http://ips.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/25/0192512114550372
It is a standard practice to include a Duty term in explanatory models of turnout. Yet the relationship between duty and voting is not that clear. Does duty really trigger voting or is it the reverse? To address this question, we p...
Past research analysing the positive effects of proportional systems on electoral participation has focused on dimensions such as quality of representation, mobilisation, competitiveness, and efficacy. However, the potential consequences of higher complexity and difficulties for accountability on proportional systems are not well known. We show tha...
Although scarce, the literature addressing the effects of the economy on voter turnout and political attitudes has yielded mixed results. By using individual, longitudinal data from Spain—a country devastated by the Great Recession—our study illuminates how the latest economic crisis has impacted citizens’ perceptions of voting. We analyze how econ...
Empirical evidence on the potential opportunities for unintentional online exposure to news is scarce. This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by examining whether and how unintentional exposure to online news is associated with individuals’ knowledge of politics and in comparison with intentional exposure to traditional and digital media...
En este trabajo se revisan los distintos indicadores que la literatura ha propuesto para medir la calidad de las experiencias participativas ciudadanas a nivel local. A continuación, se seleccionan una serie de variables para medir este fenómeno y se observa su relación con las características de los municipios en que se desarrollaron. Finamente se...
This research note pays attention to the main indicators that the literature has proposed to measure the quality of local citizen participatory experiences. Next, a number of variables are suggested to measure this phenomenon and analyze their relationship with some features of the municipalities where they were developed. Last, a multivariate mode...
Previous research shows that negative framing in the news could provoke aversion to conflict and the actors involved. In this paper, I explore the effects of a conflictive tone in a newspaper article on the perceptions of a social movement. To test this mechanism, I rely on an experiment embedded in an online survey that was conducted among young S...
Although our research considers four institutional levels (local, AC, country, Europe), the work we are presenting here deals basically with AC level and state level. On this basis, we have chosen Catalonia, Castile-La Mancha and Galicia as reference cases for our study . , We analyze two phenomena. First, to what extent there is a rescaled multile...
In this article we analyse the effects of different data collection strategies in the study of local participatory experiences in a region of Spain (Andalusia). We examine the divergences and similarities between the data collected using different methods, as well as the implications for the reliability of the data. We have collected participatory...
In this paper we argue that the widespread use of new
technologies may contribute to a change in political attitudes in
democracies in industrialized developed countries. The interactivity
and cross-cutting nature of new technologies means they allow
easier access to information. This can stimulate interest, encourage
a sense of political effective...
Introduction Political attitudes are relevant for a variety of reasons. Interested and critical citizens can actively monitor their government's activities and thus foster accountability. People who think that they are able to influence government are more likely to participate in politics, vote in elections, and follow political news. Thus, the le...
It has been often claimed that the political apathy of Spanish youth is alarming. This study tests that assessment and tries to find out whether political interest among young citizens is different with respect to European youth and if it is worsening in the last years. The levels of political interest among the youth of today are compared with tho...
¿ En qué medida el escaso interés por la política de los españoles se debe al efecto de la edad, del período o de la pertenencia a una cohorte? Mientras que la edad no puede explicar la evolución de los niveles agregados de interés por la política a lo largo del tiempo, la sustitución generacional sí; aunque cabe determinar si su efecto aumentaría,...
¿En qué medida el escaso interés por la política de los españoles se debe al efecto de la edad, del período o de la pertenencia a una cohorte? Mientras que la edad no puede explicar la evolución de los niveles agregados de interés por la política a lo largo del tiempo, la sustitución generacional sí; aunque cabe determinar si su efecto aumentaría,...
Previous research into local participation (often based on in-depth studies of the most successful examples of the phenomenon) has highlighted its qualities and potential. In this article we adopt a different strategy, in the first part building an explanatory analysis of the procedural qualities of local participation based on a mapping of local p...
The advent of the rational perspective in political science in the late 70's placed more emphasis on the role of political context and marginalized explanations based on political socialization processes. The revival of the political socialization approach in the 2000's has again highlighted the same methodological and theoretical limitations that...
This paper studies the decision to vote or not to vote using a laboratory experiment. Voters are exogenously assigned preferences for parties and different payoffs for their actions. There are three experimental conditions. In the first one, the act of voting is private, i.e. it is not visible to others. In the second condition, all players are inf...