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The Spanish electoral cycle of 2019: a tale of two countries
Abstract
In 2019 alone, Spanish citizens went to the polls at least four times – two general elections, European elections, local elections and, for some, regional elections. Moreover, in the 2016–19 legislature, the country witnessed a successful vote of no confidence that replaced a Conservative prime minister with a Socialist one; experienced an important constitutional crisis over the 2017 referendum on Catalan independence; observed the emergence for the first time of a viable far-right party; and ended with the first coalition government in the modern democratic history. The November 2019 election, the last in this long electoral cycle, left a fragmented and polarized political landscape and a left-wing cabinet – PSOE and Podemos – that does not have a majority in the chamber. This article presents the background, the results of the different elections and discusses how and why Spanish politics experienced a radical transformation likely to have an impact in the next years.
... Or the result of the Brexit referendum was shaped by the uneven consequences of austerity and globalisation across the rural-urban divide (Colantone & Stanig, 2018;Fetzer, 2019). Recent works have continued to look at the electoral consequences of the geography of discontent (Adler & Ansell, 2020;Furlong, 2019;Levi & Patriarca, 2020;Munis, 2022;Margalit, 2019) and Spain has not escaped this pattern (García del Horno et al., 2023;Rodon, 2020;Sánchez-García & Negral, 2023). ...
... Finally, and in contrast with the previous analyses (Cremaschi et al., 2022), we do not see that municipalities that have experienced a loss in public services and have lost population, are more likely to report higher support for the far-right. Despite increasing appeal to rural voters and rural traditions, Vox in Spain largely emerged as a result of the national dimension and the grievances related to Spanish nationalism were at the core of its platform (Valero, 2022;Rodon, 2020). Therefore, instead of a discourse related to immigration or the loss in the quality of public services (for the natives), it had different characteristics compared to its European counterparts, which can explain this different result. ...
... Second, consistent with some previous studies (Dancygier et al., 2024), being in the depopulation risk category implies an increase in support for the far-right party Vox. Although the party's support mainly comes from large urban centres and attracts voters that give greater salience to the national dimension (Rodon, 2020;Sánchez-García & Negral, 2023), these results show the far-right was able to make electoral inroads in the more Figure 7. The effect of switching on to depopulation risk on electoral support. ...
In many European countries, people increasingly leave rural or small municipalities to live and work in urban or metropolitan environments. Although previous work on the 'left behind' places has examined the relationship between the rural-urban divide and vote choice, less is known about how depopulation affects electoral behaviour. Is there a relationship between experiencing a loss in population and support for the different parties? We investigate this question by examining the Spanish case, a country where the topic of depopulation has become a salient issue in political competition. Using a newly compiled dataset, we also explore whether the relationship between depopulation and electoral returns is moderated by municipality size, local compositional changes, the loss of public services and changes in amenities. Our findings show that depopulated municipalities give higher support to the main Conservative party, mainly in small municipalities. Yet, municipalities on the brink of disappearance are more likely to give larger support to the far-right. Results overall show that the effect of depopulation seems to be driven by compositional changes, and not as a result of losing public services or a deterioration of the vibrancy of the town. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between internal migration and electoral behaviour.
... Overall, this study qualifies existing knowledge about the effects of affective partisan polarisation on vote choice. The analysis covers Spain, which presents a topical case of significant turmoil, political fragmentation and growing affective polarisation in recent times (Bosco & Verney 2020;Rodon 2020). Most crucially, Spain's political competition has recently entrenched along two political identities. ...
... More concretely, a substantial amount of the sample has higher trust/ likeness towards their own group compared to the Catalans. This pattern is consistent with the salience of the Catalan question in Spanish politics, especially since the 1 October 2017Catalan independence referendum (Rodon 2020). In empirical terms, the Spanish median voter distrusts/dislikes Catalans seven points more than their own group. ...
... As explained by Torcal and Comellas (2022), the survey was conducted during a period when a new radical right party, Vox, achieved its first major electoral success and eventually became a key player in Spanish politics. With Vox pulling the political debate to the extreme right, the other two right-wing parties adopted an accommodative strategy (Meguid 2005), which polarised the debate and mobilised left-wing voters, who in general are more likely to abstain (Rodon 2020). In this highly polarised environment, the results below show that affective polarisation was a driving force behind left-wing voting, as these individuals were arguably afraid of the right-wing 'tripartite' (PP, Cs and Vox). ...
What is the effect of affective polarisation on vote choice? Despite the growing interest in affective polarisation, scholars still do not fully understand the relationship between partisan affective polarisation and political behaviour. Crucially, most existing studies have assumed, often by default, that affective polarisation mainly occurs along a single politicised partisan identity. This article addresses the hitherto neglected relationship between affective polarisation and vote choice in Spain, where distrust between different and opposite groups occurs both on ideological and territorial terms. Using rich panel data, the study findings show that both affective polarisation types are significant predictors of vote choice. While affectively partisan-polarised voters are more likely to support the left, affectively polarised voters on the territorial dimension are more likely to support the right.
... The virtual disappearance of Cs, the electoral decline of UP, and the territorial consolidation of Vox between 2019 and 2023 reshaped the regional political landscape. Although notably more fragmented (Rodon, 2020), this landscape bore a striking resemblance to that of 2011 when PSOE lost most of its regional and local governments to PP in the early days of the Great Recession. ...
... Scores may vary from complete congruence/similarity (0) to complete incongruence/dissimilarity (100%). UPyD first, and then to Podemos and Ciudadanos in subsequent regional elections; and 4) the even more similar results somewhat decreasing gap after 2015, when the index's score goes down, despite the evident increase in party system fragmentation (Rodon 2020) which should, in principle, increase the potential space for dissimilarity. ...
This article examines the May 2023 regional and local elections in Spain. The vote confirmed the territorial retrenchment of the left-leaning national government coalition
members (PSOE and UP) and sparked a call for snap general
elections. The outcome of these sub-national elections was
notably shaped by the divergent trajectories of the newer
parties (Cs, UP, and Vox), as well as by the considerable
increase in the support of the main opposition party (PP).
This report shows how the existing high levels of political
polarisation contributed to nationalising the campaign and
electoral results in May 2023.
... UP defended more radical left policies than PSOE, Vox grew by owning issues more to the right of the PP, and Ciudadanos aimed for a centrist position between PSOE and PP. However, Ciudadanos ended up being more associated with the right due to its strong defense of national cohesion (Rodon 2020;Simón 2020a). ...
... That year was preceded by extremely controversial events, such as the Catalan Government's attempt to organize a self-determination referendum in 2017 and the motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in 2018 (Simón 2020a). That electoral year saw the consolidation of a multiparty system where five national-scope parties covered the whole ideological spectrum (Rodon 2020). This scenario made those General Elections particularly polarized and contested (Simón 2020b). ...
The Facebook advertising platform provides a tool to target messages at specific profiles and to display them on those users’ feeds. Political parties benefit from this marketing instrument as it allows them to target online voters with specific contents in a highly personalized strategy. This research analyses a dataset of 14,677 ads downloaded from the Facebook Ad Library and sponsored by the five main Spanish parties during the two General Election campaigns in 2019. Political microtargeting strategies have been explored and our findings suggest that old and new parties alike used this platform, apart from Vox. The other parties implemented different strategies, with PSOE making a more intensive use of this and Podemos the least. Contrary to our expectations, age-based targeting was the least prevalent criterion. Sex and geography were the main variables for targeting according to our data. Finally, the most microtargeted topics followed a similar pattern to the parties’ ideological position. One of the more controversial issue in the campaign was the country’s cohesion, and Ciudadanos and PP addressed this with an outstanding level of microtargeting.
... This brief description shows that the last decade in Spain has been extremely turbulent, characterised by a growth in the complexity of the party system due to the emergence of new nationwide protest parties, with the resulting crisis of the bipolar or nearly two-party political framework, the loss of electoral decisiveness and thus the instability of governments. In other words, the exceptionality of the Spanish case, due to regular alternation between the PP and the PSOE, the presence of stable one-party governments, the institutional management of territorial conflict and the absence of populist parties located at the two extremes of the political spectrum, has gradually disappeared (Rodon, 2020). ...
... Since 2015, therefore, Spain has lost the character of an investiture and majority democracy. The elections that gave birth to the current government were characterised by an index of bipartisanship that rose slightly compared to April, but was still lower than in the past, an increase in abstention and electoral volatility, on the electoral demand side, but also by the growth of disproportionality, due to the non-allocation of seats in small constituencies (Rodon, 2020). ...
The last decade in Spain has been extremely turbulent, characterised by a growth in the complexity of the party system due to the emergence of new protest and nationwide parties. Podemos is one of them. The chapter analyses the constituency communication of the elected members of Podemos. The analysis first illustrates the political context by describing the main electoral and competitive characteristics of Spanish democracy, then focuses on the last general election, held in November 2019. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of Podemos’ officials’ communication through Facebook and Twitter has been carried out. We demonstrate that Podemos’ MPs’ communication is mainly influenced by two variables: an institutional variable, linked to Podemos’ competitive position, and an organisational variable, linked to the distribution of power resources within the party itself.
... In contrast, the pro-independence process in Catalonia has likely been perceived as a threat by the Spanish national majority and has intensified intergroup conflict with the Catalan national minority. Furthermore, the conspicuous use of territorial politics by statewide parties for electoral purposes at the time of the independence process (Rodon 2020(Rodon , 1493 may well have hardened attitudes among Catalans towards the rest of Spain. Based on these hypotheses, the research question we address in this article is whether and how these dynamics of intergroup conflict have affected intergroup attitudes in each case. ...
... This election was held on 21 December 2017, and the pro-independence parties won again an absolute majority in Parliament. Institutional conflict remained high when the 2019 Survey was conducted (Rodon 2020). ...
Territorial conflicts are a significant feature of politics in Spain. The two most recent such processes are the cessation of violence by the terrorist group ETA and the pro-independence process in Catalonia. Both processes are likely to have affected the perception of intergroup threats, thus influencing the dynamics of intergroup conflict. This article embeds intergroup phenomena in a real context and applies theory to factual conflicts. Using data from two countrywide surveys run in 1994 and 2019, and by means of multivariate regression models, we analyze the role of socio-demographic, political, and cultural factors in the change of intergroup attitudes in Spain. Furthermore, we isolate non-political changes in society by matching between the populations of both surveys. We find that attitudes between the Basque national minority and the rest of Spain improved after the end of terrorism. Attitudes towards Catalonia do not show an association with the surge of the pro-independence movement, but attitudes from Catalans towards the rest of Spain worsened.
... As shown by Beramendi and Rogers, (2020), decentralization mediates the link between redistributive effort and inequality, with potential effects on the political system. In addition, economic crises are often associated with a destabilizing effect of the party system and the salience of the territorial dimension often increases (Hernandez and Kriesi, 2016;Kyvelou and Marava, 2017;Hutter et al., 2018;Rodon, 2020). Thus, economic shocks can also provide incentives to political parties to move to the extreme their position on the territorial dimension (Amat, 2012;Basta, 2017;Rodon, 2020). ...
... In addition, economic crises are often associated with a destabilizing effect of the party system and the salience of the territorial dimension often increases (Hernandez and Kriesi, 2016;Kyvelou and Marava, 2017;Hutter et al., 2018;Rodon, 2020). Thus, economic shocks can also provide incentives to political parties to move to the extreme their position on the territorial dimension (Amat, 2012;Basta, 2017;Rodon, 2020). Hence, when an economic crisis occurs, the territorial model is very often put into question for both parties and voters (Kyvelou and Marava, 2017;Wibbels, 2000;Bolgherini, 2014). ...
Why do political parties set an extreme or a more moderate position on the territorial dimension? Despite previous works have paid recent interest on the dynamics of the political competition on the territorial dimension, we know much less about the factors that lead to a centrifugal or a centripetal party competition on the same dimension. In this article, we offer a new way of understanding it: we argue that parties’ policy position on the decentralization continuum not only depends on the level of territorial decentralization, but also on the credibility of the institutional agreement established through the country’s constitutional rigidity. If the original territorial pact does not guarantee that the majority group will have its “hands tied” so that it does not reverse the territorial agreement, political parties will have incentives to adopt more extreme positions on the territorial dimension. We test this argument with a dataset covering around 460 political parties clustered in 28 European countries from 1999 to 2019 and by exploiting the fact that the 2008 economic crisis unleashed a shock on the territorial design. Our results confirm our expectations. We show that both the federal deal and the credibility of the institutional arrangement through constitutional rigidity are necessary conditions to appease parties’ demands on the territorial dimension. Our results have important implications for our understanding of how institutions shape political competition along the territorial dimension.
... Conversely, left-wing parties in Spain have embraced feminism, at least rhetorically, viewing it both as a just cause and as an electoral strategy to appeal to voters (Cabeza Pérez, Alonso Spain provides a compelling illustration of the complexities in examining the relationship between sexism and populism beyond host ideologies. Podemos is widely recognised for employing populist ideas while also maintaining a strong commitment to egalitarian principles aligned with left-libertarian ideals (Cabeza Pérez, Alonso Sáenz de Oger & Gómez Fortes 2023; Caravantes 2021) that were also visible in the public policies adopted by the coalition government that included Unidas Podemos (United We Can) until 2023 (Rodon 2020). In contrast, VOX has been less consistent in the use of populist ideas, but it is firmly rooted in a radical-right ideology that opposes feminism and gender equality (Cabeza In the same article, however, Caravantes (2018, p. 469) also explores the contradictions of Podemos due to their adherence to what she calls 'masculinized practices'. ...
Evidence suggests that populist parties, especially but not exclusively of the radical right, are more supported by men and can be a threat to gender equality. However, systematic analyses are missing regarding the connection between individuals’ attitudes towards gender equality and populism. We examine this link using original panel data gathered online in Spain in two waves, and find a general positive association between hostile sexism and populist attitudes. Our results contribute to unraveling one potential connection between the politicisation of gender equality and the spread of populism in Spain, a phenomenon that is also found in other countries of Southern Europe.
... For example, the negative relationship between support for protest and support for democracy in Chile and Peru follows from widespread violent protests in both cases (e.g., Somma et al., 2021). Similarly, the negative correlation between support for judicial review and support for liberal democracy in Spain possibly reveals the politicization of the Spanish judiciary following the conflict over the Catalan independence declaration (e.g., Rodon, 2020). And in Hungary, where Orban and the Fidesz party have won a series of elections despite considerable democratic backsliding, supporters of liberal democracy are more likely than opponents of liberal democracy to agree that the "universal right to vote must be questioned when so many voters are poorly informed and easily misled." ...
Much of what we know about public support for democracy is based on survey questions about “democracy,” a term that varies in meaning across countries and likely prompts uncritically supportive responses. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring support for democracy. We develop a battery of 17 survey questions that cover all eight components of liberal democracy as defined by the V-Dem project. We then ask respondents from 19 national samples to evaluate these rights and institutions. We find considerable heterogeneity across countries in how our items cohere, especially in less developed contexts. Yet, those items that are more weakly connected with general support for liberal democracy tend to reveal the influence of political events and actors, arguably indicating weaknesses in political cultures. We further identify a concise subset of seven items that provide a reliable and valid measure of support for liberal democracy across our different samples.
... Eventually, the media began to call PP, Cs, and the Vox the "rightwing tripartite." On the left side of the spectrum, PSOE and UP mobilized their electorate against the threat posed by a potential right-wing government with the participation of the radical right [84]. ...
In this article, we present the findings of a comprehensive longitudinal social network analysis conducted on Twitter across four consecutive election campaigns in Spain, spanning from 2015 to 2019. Our focus is on the discernible trend of increasing partisan and ideological homogeneity within interpersonal exchanges on this social media platform, alongside high levels of networking efficiency measured through average retweeting. This diachronic study allows us to observe how dynamics of party competition might contribute to perpetuating and strengthening network ideological and partisan homophily, creating ‘epistemic bubbles’ in Twitter, yet showing a greater resistance to transforming them into ‘partisan echo-chambers.’ Specifically, our analysis reveals that the rise of a new radical right-wing party (RRP), Vox, has heightened ideological homogeneity among users across the entire ideological spectrum. However, this process has not been uniform. While users aligned with mainstream political parties consistently share content that reinforces in-party affinity, resulting in highly efficient ‘epistemic bubbles,’ the emergence of the RRP has given rise to a distinct group of users associated with the most extreme partisan positions, characterized by a notable proportion of out-partisan hostility content, which has fostered the creation of low-efficient 'partisan echo-chambers.'
... es:8443/vod/ondemand/video/leg12/400/12_000400_168/cortes/mp4: 12_000400_168_1_18988_637877.mp4/manifest.m3u8. 12 Other issues, such as Catalan independence, which PSOE opposed, were debated in the campaign (see Rodon 2020). It was not raised as a key issue when we asked all interviewees about alternative explanations for PSOE's electoral boost in coalmining municipalities. ...
Enacting stringent climate policy has proven politically challenging, not least because of concentrated losses in fossil fuel-producing communities. “Just transition” strategies have been proposed to mitigate this distributional challenge. Yet, little is known about how such strategies affect voting behavior. Using a mixed-methods approach, we exploit a local climate policy in Spain—a “Just Transition Agreement” (JTA) to phase out coalmining, support affected workers, and invest in affected municipalities—which was negotiated by the incumbent Socialist Party (PSOE) government with affected unions and businesses shortly before a national election. A difference-in-differences study shows that PSOE’s vote share in coalmining municipalities increased at the 2019 election relative to similar municipalities, implying that the JTA was electorally successful. Further statistical tests and elite interviews suggest that this electoral boost was driven by unions’ support of the JTA. Our findings have implications for how parties can craft popular climate policy.
... In fact, said elections were the outcome of a failed attempt to form a government after the ones held in April of the same year. The electoral cycle ending in 2023 has been heavily influenced by the sharply polarised competition among the different ideological blocs (Rodon 2020). Thus, the first-ever left-wing coalition government within the current democratic regime was born. ...
This paper analyses the messages that candidates emitted on the social network Twitter (now called “X”) during the campaign for the 2023 municipal elections in the city of Seville and the emotions they used. This type of electoral process has usually been deemed as second-order elections within multilevel governance political systems, implying that the national arena may affect local dynamics to some degree. Thus, the main research objective is to determine the extent to which elements of nationalisation were used in candidates’ rhetoric, along with the emotional components associated with each political formation during a local campaign somewhat relevant on the state level. A total of 960 tweets were retrieved through R Statistics and the Application Programming Interface of the social network itself. They were then analysed drawing upon the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count programme. The results show that certain elements of nationalisation were indeed used by candidates, in addition to emotional-level differences present in their messages. This accentuates the evident need for further research on municipal elections and campaigns, as well as on their potential distinctive features regarding political jurisdiction.
... However, the financial crisis of 2008 had a significant influence on Spanish politics; the popular discontent with the political situation and austerity measures resulted in social movements taking power and forming new political parties (Feenstra et al. 2017;Ordóñez, Feenstra, and Franks 2018). Corresponding to the trend of augmented party systems, having several new parties within the party system has resulted in difficulties forming governments and Spain holding four elections in as many years between 2016 and 2019 (Rodon 2020). Studies on the most recent elections in Spain also show a shift whereby voters are keen to vote in relation to cultural and identarian values, even though they have historically voted according to a left-right dimension based on economic policy (Fraile and Lewis-Beck 2012). ...
This article sets out to uncover the role that educational activities for members play in the construction of identities in political parties. Guided by a framing perspective, the study focuses on five left-leaning parties in Sweden and Spain and their intra-party education, and interviews have been conducted with party representatives and study leaders. The analysis reveals that the educational activities provided by the parties for their members are intended to create a sense of belonging and connect the members to the parties. Three different tendencies for creating a sense of ‘we-ness’ in the parties unfold – (i) Welcome!, (ii) Get in line! And (iii) Unite! – which mirrors how identities are constructed within the education to reinforce the members’ relationships with their parties. Emphasising these three identities serves to distinguish how frames are integrated into educational settings and how the parties motivate their members to become engaged in the party collectives.
... (2) the Spanish exceptionalism in the European Union (EU) was finally ended by the electoral support for a far-right party (Vox) (Turnbull-Dugarte, 2019); (3) the first coalition government in the young democracy (PSOE and Unidas Podemos) saw the light after the last election held in November 2019; and (4) the trend of a fragmented and polarized Congress started in 2015 continued in the last election and the government coalition does not have a majority in the chamber. Rodon (2020) presents the background of the turbulent period and analyzed the likely impacts in the years to come, contending that the years of bipartisanship and the lack of a successful far-right party in the parliament are over. ...
This paper aims to shed some light on an issue that has not been analyzed enough in previous studies on complex transportation networks. The financial crisis and disrupting events like the COVID-19 pandemic episode are affecting how governments make crucial decisions regarding policymaking paying more attention to experts' opinions. The impacts of disruptive events that could affect each road section will be analyzed using the criticality of the high capacity road network in Spain under different policymaking scenarios, such as direct democracy based on pure provincial decentralization (federal or cantonal vision), representative democracy in which decisions are taken by the National Parliament, and the governance based on technocracy stimulated by 'what matters is what works' (Southern Local Economy, 16(4), 264-271, 2001) using an Evidence-Based Policy Making (EBPM) case study based on a Data Envelopment Analysis applied to four accessibility indicators. We will complement our analysis with the different results obtained by the different national parties that were represented in the past election (November, 2019): PSOE, PP, VOX, Unidas Podemos, Ezquerra Republicana de Catalunya, Ciudadanos, Junts per Catalunya, Partido Nacionalista Vasco and Euskal Herria Bildu, exploring in-depth the obtained differences between the technocrat solution and the direct and representative democracy results. Important insights and lessons for the future will be obtained from the different party visions observed among the regionalist (nationalist) and the state-wide parties. The spillover effects created by the networks are so important that the room for federalist solutions might be very limited.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12061-022-09451-5.
... The Spanish model, with its moderate two-partyism able to govern the tensions across the centre-periphery cleavage, was one of the most affected. The challenges of the new fragmented and polarised party-system, and the constitutional crisis with the autonomous community of Catalonia prove how the decade was an important juncture for the Spanish political system (Rodon, 2020;Simón, 2020aSimón, , 2020b. The indices regarding the effective number of parties, now constantly twice higher than those before the recession and amongst the highest in Southern Europe, confirm the transformation of the old model. ...
Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain went several times to the polls during the 2010-2019 decade. It was a period characterised by the strenuous effort to recover the economic situation before the onset of the Great Recession; an effort, however, often constrained by externally imposed austerity policies, and by a refugee crisis that contributed to the growing salience of the immigration issue. The article adopts an original sub-national approach to examine if and how the economic situation and the incidence of immigration affected the electoral outcomes in the four South-European countries. Adopting a theory of retrospective behaviour, the research reported in the article confirms the association between employment and immigration levels, on the one hand, and punishment of the incumbent government on the other. However, the electoral effects of immigration are conditioned by the partisan composition of the government and, under centre-right cabinets, are aggravated by a negative economic conjuncture.
... Podemos: mutamenti competitivi e organizzativi L'ultimo decennio in Spagna è stato caratterizzato da una crescita della complessità del sistema partitico, dovuta alla comparsa di nuovi partiti di protesta di ambito nazionale: a sinistra dell'asse politico, Podemos, mentre sul centro-destra, il partito di origini regionali Ciudadanos (C's) e più di recente il partito per la destra radicale, Vox. L'eccezionalità del caso spagnolo, dovuta a una regolare alternanza tra il PP e il PSOE, la presenza di governi monopartitici stabili, la gestione istituzionale del conflitto territoriale e l'assenza di partiti populisti appartenenti ai due estremi dell'asse politico, è gradualmente scomparsa (Rodon, 2020), lasciando il posto a un pluripartitismo bipolare che fa perno ancora sul PSOE e il PP, ma che vede a sinistra Unidas Podemos -la coalizione tra Podemos e il partito della sinistra radicale Izquierda Unida (IU) -e sul versante opposto Vox, entrambi attori fondamentali per la costruzione di coalizioni con potenziale di vittoria. ...
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... glavni cilj predsjednika Španjolske socijalističke radničke stranke (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE) Sáncheza, kao i većine glavnih političkih aktera, bilo je razbijanje političke blokade i formiranje vlade. Najveća katalonska stranka pobornica neovisnosti koja djeluje u španjolskome parlamentu, Republikanska ljevica Katalonije (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, ERC), bila je suzdržana pri glasanju o povjerenju novoj Sánchezovoj vladi, a zauzvrat je tražila jamstva da će buduća vlada omogućiti raspravu o teritorijalnom sukobu, odnosno katalonskome pitanju (Rodon, 2020(Rodon, , str. 1491. 1 Zahvaljujući tom potezu Sánchez je zajedno s koalicijskim partnerima iz lijeve koalicije Ujedinjene možemo (Unidas Podemos, UP) uspio oformiti manjinsku vladu (v. ...
Porast potpore pokretu za neovisnost u Kataloniji za posljedicu je imao institucijsku nestabilnost i promjenu španjolskoga stranačkog sustava. Ovaj rad istražuje razlike u interpretacijskim okvirima katalonskog pitanja na temelju izjava nacionalnih stranačkih čelnika koji su sudjelovali na četiri predizborna sučeljavanja za parlamentarne izbore u studenom 2019. Interpretacijski okviri definirani su s obzirom na tri pitanja: 1) jesu li nacionalni stranački čelnici u predizbornim sučeljavanjima prikazali katalonski proces (Procés) kao neprijateljski, tj. kao onaj koji ruši ustavni poredak ili kao legitimno pravo građana na prosvjed; 2) kako stranački čelnici uokviruju španjolsku državu – kao izričito unitarnu zemlju ili višenacionalnu državu; 3) smatraju li nacionalni stranački čelnici da su nužne ustavne promjene da bi se riješilo katalonsko pitanje ili preferiraju status quo. Analiza provedena metodom uokvirivanja utvrdila je pet interpretacijskih okvira te pokazala da dva interpretacijska okvira koja podrazumijevaju afirmativno rješavanje katalonskog pitanja dijalogom s katalonskom vladom (Generalitat) uživaju većinu i na sučeljavanjima i nakon izbora.
... In accordance with Spanish electoral law, the campaign lasted eight days and electoral expenditure was cut by half. On this occasion, a coalition between Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and Unidas Podemos, with the support of handful of regional parties allowed a government to be formed (Rodon 2020;Simón 2021). Previous investigations have shown that social politics, territorial model, and economy were vital issues in the public debate during these elections (Pérez-Curiel and García-Gordillo 2020). ...
Sponsored content on Facebook has become an indispensable tool for implementing political campaign strategies. However, in political communication research, this channel is still unexplored due to its advertising model in which only target audiences are exposed to sponsored content. The launching of the Facebook Ad Library in May 2018 can be considered a turning point in this regard, inasmuch as it now offers users direct access to ads paid for by political parties, among other advertisers. This paper analyzes some aspects of the strategies implemented by six national parties during the campaigns running up to the two general elections held in Spain in 2019, by performing an analysis on a corpus of 14,684 ads downloaded directly from the Facebook Ad Library. It also provides evidence of the different emphasis placed by the parties on sponsored content. For its part, an analysis of ad scheduling shows how the publishing of ads was stepped up as polling day approached, while also revealing the practice of posting political content way in advance of election campaigns.
... Sinn F ein became the largest party by vote share for the first time, failing to become the largest party in the D ail (lower house) because it underestimated its own electoral potential and therefore selected too few candidates. The results led to a long government formation period, in common with several other recent elections in Europe (see Eberl et al. 2020;Rodon 2020;Pilet 2020). Fianna F ail and Fine Gael each refused to countenance entering government with Sinn F ein, and so they were forced to form a government coalition with one anotheranother first for the Irish party system. ...
At the general election of February 2020, Sinn Féin won a plurality of the vote in the Republic of Ireland for the first time. The party system remained highly fragmented and, with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael refusing to enter government with Sinn Féin, government formation took a record 20 weeks. Those 20 weeks coincided with the emergence of the Covid-19 public health emergency in Europe. A minority caretaker government introduced significant policy measures to address the associated public health and economic crises. At the end of June, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael entered government together for the first time, and the Green Party joined them in a three-party majority coalition. The government faces significant challenges resulting from Covid-19 and from the UK’s exit from the EU, and other policy problems including housing and healthcare.
... (2020), Fernandes and Magalhaes (2020) and Rodon (2020). The 2010 election resulted in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government (see Quinn 2011), the 2015 election resulted in a small Conservative majority of 12 seats (see Green and Prosser 2016), whilst the 2017 election resulted in a minority Conservative government (see Prosser 2018). ...
The UK election of 12th December 2019 – the third election in five years and the second snap election in a row – returned a Conservative majority government led by Boris Johnson and the lowest number of Labour MPs since 1935. Three-and-a-half years after the 2016 referendum, the government finally had sufficient parliamentary support for Brexit, and at the end of January 2020 the UK left the European Union. The result of the election can largely be explained by the continuing importance of Brexit. The previous election, held in 2017, had seen an increase in party sorting along Brexit lines – Leavers had shifted towards the Conservatives, whilst Remainers shifted towards Labour. The 2019 election saw a continuation of that process on the Leave side, as the Conservatives continued to win over Leavers, but a slight reversal on the Remain side, with some Remainers abandoning Labour for more avowedly pro-EU parties such as the Liberal Democrats.
This PhD dissertation aims to contribute theoretically and empirically to the study of political polarization, with a special focus on its affective expression: affective polarization (AP). Theoretically, the thesis provides a novel dialogue between collective action studies, the intergroup relations literature and the affective polarization literature, resulting in different theoretical insights that are important when trying to grasp affective polarization dynamics in context, and when thinking about depolarization interventions. Empirically, taking Spain as a case study, and adopting a mixed-methods approach, this dissertation provides extensive descriptive -cross-sectional and longitudinal- evidence on the evolution of political polarization indicators and their relationships over a period of more than a decade (2010-2023), to subsequently explore some of the long-term and short-term causes of AP in the multidimensional Spanish political system. In this sense, one of the empirical chapters of this PhD dissertation uses panel data to analyze the relationship between perceived ideological polarization on the two main axes of political competition in Spain (the left-right and territorial dimensions) and AP. The chapter reveals that this relationship is conditioned by individuals' self-reported ideology, meaning that perceptions of polarization on the territorial axis are clearly more positively related to AP levels among right-wing individuals in comparison to left-wing individuals, whereas perceptions of polarization on the left-right axis are somewhat more related to AP among left-wing individuals. The analyses also reveal that the relationship between perceived territorial polarization and AP varies with time, in relation to the salience of the territorial conflict dimension. This chapter underlines the importance of multidimensionality and of individuals' values, in this case their ideology, when studying affective polarization. This PhD dissertation also contributes to the literature on the short-term causes of affective (de)polarization, by means of another chapter that examines, also using panel data, if and how the COVID-19 conjuncture fostered affective polarization dynamics. The findings indicate that, at an individual level, there were participants that increased their levels of AP during the pandemic. In a different vein, we found that aggregate levels of AP decreased when de-escalation policies, which ended the strict lockdowns and were highly popular, consensual and designed by the government in collaboration with health experts, were implemented. Another chapter of the PhD dissertation, analyzing language and interaction in focus group data, digs deep into how political polarization manifests itself within lay citizens' talk and interactions, thereby providing insights into how polarized and even prejudiced accounts of political adversaries are collectively constructed from a rhetorical position of reasonableness. This chapter shows that the intragroup context is a setting in which very polarized versions of the others are reproduced and kept alive, and thereby constitute contexts in which these representations might also be challenged. Taken together, the chapters of this PhD dissertation help to broaden the scope of political polarization and depolarization studies and to fill some important gaps left by previous literature.
Background
Leadership changes within public organizations are often associated with achieving the organization’s vision. This exploratory study examines critical incidents and the anxiety experienced by the head of the department at the local government in the context of leadership change in the public organization. It explores anxiety, which has rarely been explored in connection with leadership change, especially with regard to public organizations and countries with a high-power distance culture. Thus, it comprehensively describes the sources, course, and consequences of anxiety due to leadership change.
Methods
Critical incident technique (CIT) was used to conduct analysis because of its suitability as a theoretical framework for the exploratory nature of this research. Data were obtained through in-depth interviews from 26 informants who served as heads of departments in cities.
Results
The findings revealed the causes, course, and consequence of the anxiety experienced in response to leadership change. Political choice, culture change, policy change, fear of loss, and unaccountable financing were identified as sources of anxiety. Anxiety manifested through negative, cognitive, and behavioral reactions. The consequences were divided into in-circle, out-circle, and ambivalence-circle participation.
Conclusions
High-power distance culture causes leaders to portray hegemony with boundaries that are difficult to access as well as appear more directive to strengthen control within the organization. The integrated model presented here (causes, course, and consequences of anxiety) is expected to enrich the integrated, modern, and emotional science through a functional account of the emotional approach. Cognitive and affective reactions have a two-way relationship, wherein emotion influences cognition and cognition elicits emotion.
This article explores the ideological controversies around Spanish liberalism through the story of the Citizens party – from its rise in 2006 through 2023, after a sequence of electoral defeats that almost certified its demise. Born as a regional party in Catalonia with an anti-nationalist platform focused on linguistic policies, in national politics it fostered a liberal agenda. The article examines Citizens’ politics of language hiding the party’s liberal identity because of its association to right-wing outlooks. At its founding documents there was an amalgam of liberal and social democratic constitutional values inspiring the party’s political approach. No earnest question was made of their difficult accommodation, given their disparity at the policy level. In 2017 an internal debate arouse, and from 2019 a number of electoral setbacks accelerated it. By then the liberal language legitimizing its passage from regional into a national party had lost its civic appeal.
This comprehensive and comparative book makes clear what party families are and, in doing so, helps categorise and make sense of parties in different countries. It describes the ideology of the families in Western Europe as well as classifying political parties accordingly. Furthermore, the book examines who the party families’ supporters are in terms of their social background and political values. What role do class, education, and religion play in the 21st century?
Finally, the book provides a discussion of the degree to which the concept of party families is still meaningful in the 21st century and how it needs to be studied comparatively and comprehensively. Is party family still valid as a conceptual device to classify and compare parties across countries in Western Europe?
This text will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners working in the field of political behaviour, political parties and party politics, policy studies, and more broadly comparative and European politics.
Available here: https://www.routledge.com/Party-Families-in-Western-Europe/Langsaether/p/book/9781138336964
This article interprets how five left-leaning parties in Sweden and Spain intend to politically socialise their members through the use of educational activities. By applying a framing perspective on interviews with leading party representatives from the five parties, the analysis theoretically illuminates how educational activities can be a tool for mobilisation. While the interviewed party representatives stress that educating their members has several functions for a party, three salient frames about party education are identified in the interview data as follows: education as (i) movement building, (ii) training members and leaders and (iii) deliberative reflection. Categorising the different ways that in which education is understood shows how different political motives are integrated into parties’ education. Hence, the findings emphasise the intermediating role that education plays between a party organisation and its members in left parties.
Affective polarisation measured with feelings towards parties tends to overestimate the degree to which people dislike voters of opposing parties. This paper explores some of the factors that account for the gap between party affective polarisation (PAP) and voter affective polarisation (VAP). In particular, I first argue and show that the PAP-VAP gap increases with ideological distance between individuals and out-parties, although this difference begins to decrease after a certain level of ideological discrepancy is achieved. Second, social sorting increases the probability that individuals extend their antipathy towards parties to their voters, thus reducing the PAP-VAP gap. Third, whereas ideological distance leads to VAP among individuals with low levels of social sorting, it does not make a difference for socially sorted people. I discuss the relevance of these two factors by utilising the third wave of the E-DEM panel. The results have relevant implications for the consequences of affective polarisation.
This article seeks to assess and explain territorial policy dynamics in five European countries—Italy, Spain, Germany, France and the United Kingdom—from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic up to early 2021. The crisis has clearly highlighted well-known differences between centralized and decentralized systems. Yet focusing on this dichotomy is not sufficient. It is suggested that, while the distribution of authority between central and regional governments matters, policy dynamics—that is, how different territorial levels interact in policy-making processes—are even more important in driving multi-level responses to the emergency. Whether these dynamics are hierarchical (France), competitive (Italy and Spain), cooperative (Germany) or mixed (the United Kingdom) depends on how pre-crisis institutional, sectoral and political “causal forces” moderate the impact of an exogenous shock.
Electoral rules are a crucial institutional factor shaping the entry and success of new parties. However, testing how they affect voting behavior is problematic when using observational data in cross-national studies. As district magnitude is usually correlated with politically salient features affecting the likelihood of voting for new (and small) parties, the latent support of small parties differs across electoral systems. Using a quasi-experimental design in Spain focused on the district viability of a new party, Vox, in two elections held within 196 days, I provide a more robust estimate of the impact of electoral systems on the success of new parties. Strong evidence that the electoral system makes a difference for new parties has been identified: strategic considerations found in the districts where Vox was not successful prevented a significant number of voters from supporting the party.
Aunque en la reciente historia política española se han dado diferentes situaciones parlamentarias que auguraban la formación de un gobierno estatal de coalición, ello sólo ha sucedido en la formación del actual gobierno. Los efectos de los procesos electorales de 2015 tanto en el ámbito estatal como en el autonómico, unidos a la fallida investidura de Pedro Sánchez en septiembre de 2019, han hecho más necesario aún intentar comprender por qué el gobierno de coalición no ha aparecido como un resultado normal en la política española.
Palabras clave: Gobiernos de coalición. Gobiernos minoritarios. Parlamentarismo. España. Sistema Electoral.
What is the effect of violence on political mobilization? Taking the repression-mobilization nexus debate as a starting point, we study the effects of police interventions on political participation, focusing on the Spanish police crackdown on Catalonia's independence referendum on 1 October 2017. We analyze the effect of police actions on turnout using detailed aggregate data, as well as a survey conducted a few days after the referendum. The two empirical approaches show that police interventions had both deterrent and inverse spatial spillover effects. Although police raids had a local negative impact on turnout, they induced positive spillover effects in the surrounding areas. Our findings also indicate heterogeneity in the spatial dynamics, with police actions encouraging people to go to vote in nearby areas, but also mobilizing residents in neighboring areas to participate, especially those individuals with fewer incentives to turn out to vote.
Referendums on independence in liberal democracies are rare, even more so when held without the agreement of the central government. On 1 October 2017, a referendum on independence took place in Catalonia despite the opposition of Spanish central authorities and the lack of Constitutional support. This article analyses and attempts to explain this case of a de facto referendum in the international context of independence referendums. We consider both strategic culture and rationality as relevant factors for explaining the political actors' behaviour. Although the political use of popular mobilisation through a referendum to strengthen legitimacy is common among this type of referendums, the Catalan case presents relevant peculiarities since it occurred in a liberal democracy, the civil society were instrumental in making the vote possible, and central authorities repressed both the organisation of the vote and the voters themselves. Our case study analysis can be used in future research on self-determination conflicts and independence referendums.
The July 2019 parliamentary election was the first national election since Greece officially exited the eight-year bailout programmes in August 2018. It was preceded by three ballots on European Parliament, regional and municipal elections in May 2019, which served as a decompression valve for the electorate to punish the incumbent government and indicate a clear will for governmental change, since the conservative party ND won by a landslide. Whereas ND’s victory in the parliamentary election was anticipated, it was its scale that would define the shape of the new government. Increasing its score by 11.76 points since September 2015, ND won 39.85% of the vote, securing a comfortable majority of 158 out of 300 seats. This is the first majority government in Greece since 2011, marking the return of the country to a new normality. Even if SYRIZA failed to deliver the anti-bailout programme which had initially brought the party to the centre of electoral competition, it still gathered 31.53% of the vote, losing just 3.93 points since its last victory in 2015, hence securing its place as one of the two key actors in the new two-partyism. Party fragmentation was limited to six parliamentary parties instead of eight, with the neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, having lost its parliamentary representation.
Many political commentators and politicians claim that the Great Recession is the leading explanation for the surge of support to independence in Catalonia. However, the available evidence does not show a significant role of the economic crisis in that political process. To enhance the knowledge on the potential effects of economic changing conditions, we extend the analysis to the subsequent period, when the economic recovery took place in Catalonia. Even in such a different economic scenario the same results hold, because no systematic relationship is found between changes in economic variables and variations in support to independence.
The 2018 regional elections in Andalucía marked the end of Spain’s exceptional status as a country with a party system free from the radical right. The electoral success of the radical right-wing challenger, Vox, who gained 11% of the vote and 12 seats in the regional parliament, brought this exceptionalism to an end. This paper analyses the individual-level determinants that explain the electoral success of Vox and the emergence of the radical right within the Spanish party system. The results indicate that concerns over devolution, likely engendered by the Catalan separatist crisis, predominantly explain voters’ preferences for the right-wing challenger. This is true both amongst the general electorate as well as amongst the former voters of other right-wing parties. Significantly, against popular assumptions and empirical observations explaining the rise of radical right-wing parties across much of Western Europe, the results display no empirical link between immigration and electoral support for Vox.
Less than 30 years after Fukuyama and others declared liberal democracy’s eternal dominance, a third wave of autocratization is manifest. Gradual declines of democratic regime attributes characterize contemporary autocratization. Yet, we lack the appropriate conceptual and empirical tools to diagnose and compare such elusive processes. Addressing that gap, this article provides the first comprehensive empirical overview of all autocratization episodes from 1900 to today based on data from the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem). We demonstrate that a third wave of autocratization is indeed unfolding. It mainly affects democracies with gradual setbacks under a legal façade. While this is a cause for concern, the historical perspective presented in this article shows that panic is not warranted: the current declines are relatively mild and the global share of democratic countries remains close to its all-time high. As it was premature to announce the “end of history” in 1992, it is premature to proclaim the “end of democracy” now.
The Making Electoral Democracy Work project conducted a unique survey prior to the election held on 21 December 2017 in exceptional circumstances in Catalonia. In spite of a series of major events in fall 2017, overall election results were similar to those of the previous regional election, held in 2015. In addition to standard demographic, attitudinal, and vote choice questions, the survey included novel questions on identity, support for independence, perceptions of corruption, and acceptance of the result by losers. The data will be particularly useful to scholars seeking to assess the impact of long- and short-term factors on vote choice in such unusual circumstances, the crystallisation of public opinion, and voters’ willingness to accept that their side lost the election.
This article examines the influence of economic crisis on voting preferences for the emerging Spanish parties (Podemos and Ciudadanos). We develop a multinomial model that tests their voting antecedents, and we find three results that may be relevant for the literature on the emergence of parties. First, a negative evaluation of the country’s economic situation has a major impact on votes for the two parties. Second, the perception of corruption also plays a crucial role in understanding support for the two emerging parties. And third, both the evaluation of the country’s economic situation and the perception of corruption interact to account for the emergence of both Podemos and Ciudadanos. We conclude that the emergence of new parties has an economic basis, but political factors – such as corruption – are not suppressed by this. Conversely, the two factors interact in order to finally give rise to the new parties.
This article demonstrates that regional branches of national parties do not limit regional election campaigns to regional issues. On the contrary, they nationalize regional elections (i.e., emphasize national-level issues in regional campaigns) as an electoral strategy to win votes. The empirical evidence comes from the quantitative content analysis of regional-level manifestos of the two main national parties in Spain, PP, and PSOE, between 1998 and 2015. The percentage of references to the national government is taken as an indicator of nationalization. We find that parties nationalize regional elections under two situations: when the national co-partisans are in office enjoying high levels of popularity or when the national co-partisans are in opposition and the nationally governing party is unpopular. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the role of national parties in subordinating the regional arena to the national one in federal and decentralized states.
Full text: http://publius.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/09/26/publius.pjw030.full.pdf+html
The manipulation of the Spanish electoral system carried out by the political elites that led the political transition has been proved by several studies. This manipulation moves through the existence of a large number of low-magnitude districts and its interaction with malapportionment, the Hondt formula and, above all, the variance effect of district magnitudes. In this paper I will discuss another bias that has not yet been studied by researchers, and which also paved the way for UCD victories: the turnout bias. I will show how the manipulation of the electoral system led UCD to win systematically in the districts where there was low turnout and how its opponents won in districts with high turnout. Therefore the «price» of the seats for UCD was lower. This bias has remained and it favours those parties that have support in the districts with low turnout which are, at the same time, more overrepresented.
After reviewing the theoretical underpinnings behind the ‘conventional wisdom’ that voters on the left abstain more, this article critically assesses the traditional approach of the so-called ideological bias on turnout. By compiling a new large dataset (197 country elections in Europe), this paper shows that centrist abstention is higher than leftist or rightist abstention. The analysis reveals that a society’s ideological turnout bias reflects its socioeconomic context (traditional explanation), but also that party strategies play a key role. Most importantly, results show that convergence towards the centre triggers a higher centrist abstention. Additionally, this article demonstrates that both socioeconomic and partisan factors have heterogeneous effects across ideological positions. These findings critically challenge prior understanding of the ideological bias on turnout and the impact of parties’ election strategies when pursuing the key centre voter.
The Catalan case is usually depicted in the literature as a typical example of a nation without state with a predominant civic nationalism, where the importance of dual identities tends to generate claims for self-government short of independence. However, the recent evolution of Catalan and Spanish politics shows that independence receives relevant levels of support even among groups expressing some degree of identification with the state identity. This paper aims to fill the gap in this relatively unexplored dimension of Catalan nationalism by analysing the factors that help explain support for independence in Catalonia. The results of the research point to the importance of identity in explaining attitudes towards independence but also that it receives widespread support across Catalan society, suggesting much more complex relations.
The process of formation of electoral expectations in proportional representation systems is analysed in this article. Contrary to Duvergerian or electoral coordination theories, by using survey and in-depth elite interview data from Spain in the 1970s and 1980s, it is shown that strategic voting depends on heuristics (i.e. extrapolations from the previous election) rather than on rational expectations. The main implication is that strategic voting is possible in large districts.
It is often argued that clientelism is a key feature of electoral mobilisation in southern European democracies. This article examines the evidence for clientelism in the Spanish case, assessing the recruitment, redistributive strategies and electoral performance of governing parties in the 1977–96 period. It finds little evidence of extensive clientelistic mobilisation; instead, political parties’ use of state resources is largely consistent with their programmatic and ideological positions. ‘Old’ clientelism from the pre‐democratic era mostly did not survive the change of regime, whilst ‘new’ clientelism based on the expansion of state employment contributed to the Socialist Party's organisational consolidation, but was not a significant feature of its strategy of electoral mobilisation.
Among the many incognita which face new democracies, electoral stabilisation and party institutionalisation are of particular significance. This analysis discusses the major features and factors which have contributed to the establishment of increasingly stable relations between Spanish parties and voters. It examines continuities in the most important indicators of electoral behaviour, the mechanisms which have served to anchor support for the parties, and the constraining impact of the electoral system on party competition. Despite appearances to the contrary, Spanish voters have long been firmly rooted in specific ideological spaces, their electoral preferences have undoubtedly become stabilised, and electoral competition has followed predictable patterns.
In Catalonia and beyond, the recent upheaval of secessionist mobilizations has challenged not only extant territorial frameworks and integration processes but also one’s understandings around nationalism and its social bases of support. Upper-class and bourgeois sectors of the population have been traditionally considered as overrepresented within the Catalan nationalist constituency. The study’s data on the social background of supporters instead indicate an interclass constituency behind the procés that unfolded under the post-2007 Great Recession. As the movement for Catalan self-determination and independence became a mass phenomenon, it broadened the traditional constituency of Catalan nationalism and encompassed large sectors of the population, including the working classes. Looking at the intersection of positions on nation and class, it is suggested that cross-class alliances were crucial in accounting for the surge of support for independence that has been observed in Catalonia since 2010.
A well-functioning democracy requires a degree of mutual respect and a willingness to talk across political divides. Yet numerous studies have shown that many electorates are polarized along partisan lines, with animosity towards the partisan out-group. In this article, we further develop the idea of affective polarization, not by partisanship, but instead by identification with opinion-based groups. Examining social identities formed during Britain’s 2016 referendum on European Union membership, we use surveys and experiments to measure the intensity of partisan and Brexit-related affective polarization. The results show that Brexit identities are prevalent, felt to be personally important, and cut across traditional party lines. These identities generate affective polarization as intense as that of partisanship in terms of stereotyping, prejudice, and various evaluative biases, convincingly demonstrating that affective polarization can emerge from identities beyond partisanship.
The 2019 Portuguese general elections have led to the formation of another minority government of the Socialist Party. Right-wing parties suffered a resounding defeat. The election had two key consequences. First, after four years of contract parliamentarism with an extreme-left party, the Socialists returned to their historical position of pivotal party in the system. Socialist leader Costa refused to replicate alliances with parties to his left. Second, the 2019 election witnessed the emergence of three new parties, Chega, Iniciativa Liberal and Livre. The election of Chega marks a watershed moment in Portuguese democratic history, as for the first time an extreme-right populist party has gained representation in the country.
The 2015–9 election period was long; hence, the election campaign had already begun when the Prime Minister called the election for 5 June 2019, just ten days after the EP election. Nine already established parties, one old yet not represented party and three new parties, two of which are (very) opposed to immigration fielded candidates across the ten electoral districts for the 175 seats in parliament (excluding the four MPs elected in Greenland and The Faroe Islands). The overlapping EP election, climate, and immigration characterized the campaign agenda. One of the new (immigration sceptic) parties made it into parliament, and among the established parties, some were (more than) halved, others were (more than) doubled, and some remained stable. In particular, the two government (supporting) parties, Liberal Alliance and Danish People’s Party, got a slap in the face by the electorate. While the Prime Minister’s party, the Liberals, did well, the majority shifted to left of centre, which resulted in a minority Social Democratic government headed by Mette Frederiksen, supported by the Red-Green Alliance, Socialist People’s Party and Social Liberals.
This paper explores the relationship between the economic turmoil generated by the Great Recession and the increase of secessionism. Some authors have stressed that the Great Recession triggered changes in territorial preferences and, in the context of a conflict between the centre and the periphery, fuelled secessionism as a radical shift of the institutional setup. Nevertheless, other researchers have remarked that a recession may enhance the status quo bias and decrease the likelihood of changes. Our paper aims at contributing to this debate by analysing the case of Catalonia. We use an aggregate and an individual-level empirical design to explore the relationship between the deterioration of the economic situation and the increase of preferences for secession among the Catalan population. The findings from the analysis of our empirical models do not support the hypothesis that the effects of the Great Recession had any significant impact on political preferences in Catalonia.
Conflicting theories and mixed empirical results exist on the relationship between ethnic diversity and trust. This article argues that these mixed empirical results might be driven by contextual conditions. We conjecture that political competition could strengthen ethnic saliency and, in turn, salient ethnic identities can activate or intensify in-group trust and depress trust in members of other ethnic groups. We test this conjecture using the move toward secession in Catalonia, Spain. We conduct trust experiments across ethnic lines in Catalonia before and during the secessionist process. After three years of proindependence mobilization in Catalonia, one of the ethnic groups, Spanish speakers living in Catalonia, has indeed increased its in-group trust. This result is robust after a set of individual-level variables are controlled for, but no equivalent result is found in a comparable region, the Basque Country.
The effect of immigration preferences on electoral outcomes in Spain is understudied. This paper hypothesises that, even in the absence of a radical right party, immigration preferences can be associated with mainstream voting when they are incorporated into established axes of political conflict. The analyses show that the electoral strength of immigration preferences is connected with the strength of the centre–periphery cleavage in Spain. More specifically, immigration preferences are a stronger determinant of the vote for parties with relatively more pro-decentralisation stances, among individuals with more coherent immigration and decentralisation attitudes, and in regions where the centre–periphery cleavage is stronger.
This article presents a model for successful dual transitions derived from an analysis of the Spanish experience of 1977–1986. I argue that the successful implementation of structural adjustment programs depends on two factors: one, a reform sequence that delays deepened structural adjustment until after the consolidation of democracy seems assured, and two, a strong ruling party. In the Spanish case and in other successful dual transitions discussed here, the party that won the first democratic elections concentrated on consolidating democracy while the party that won the second national elections concentrated on economic reforms.
Coalition formation is a pervasive aspect of social life. This paper presents a theory of coalition formation with a statement of conditions and assumptions. While applicable to groups of varying sizes, it is shown to be consistent with Caplow's theory of coalitions in the triad. It successfully handles the experimental results of Vinacke and Arkoff. Finally, the applicability of various work in n-person game theory is discussed with the conclusion that, in its present state, it fails to provide a basis for a descriptive theory of coalitions.
This article analyses the dynamics of electoral competition in a multilevel setting. It is based on a content analysis of the party manifestos of the Spanish PP and PSOE in eight regional elections held between 2001 and 2003. It provides an innovative coding scheme for analysing regional party manifestos and on that basis seeks to account for inter-regional, intra-party and inter-party differences in regional campaigning. The authors have tried to explain the inter-regional variation of the issue profiles of state-wide parties in regional elections on the basis of a model with four independent variables: the asymmetric nature of the system, the electoral cycle, the regional party systems and the organisation of the state-wide parties. Three of their hypotheses are rejected, but the stronger variations in the regional issue profiles of the PSOE corroborate the assumption that parties with a more decentralised party organisation support regionally more diverse campaigning. The article concludes by offering an alternative explanation for this finding and by suggesting avenues for further research.
Can electoral rules be designed to achieve political ideals such as accurate representation of voter preferences, accountable governments, and strong economic performance? The academic literature commonly divides electoral systems into two types, majoritarian and proportional, and asserts that the choice between these implies a straightforward trade-off by which having more of an ideal that a majoritarian system provides implies less of something that PR delivers in equal measure. We posit that these trade-offs are better characterized as non-linear and that one can gain most of the advantages attributed to PR, while sacrificing less of those attributed to majoritarian elections, by maintaining district magnitudes in the low to moderate range. We test this intuition against data from 610 election outcomes in 81 countries between 1945 and 2006. Electoral systems that use low-magnitude multi-member districts produce disproportionality indices almost on par with those of pure PR systems while limiting party system fragmentation, producing simpler government coalitions, and surpassing both majoritarian and pure PR systems on some indicators of government performance.
Kinds of causes, predictability, and teleology are viewed by a practicing biologist.
Catalonia: A New Independent State in Europe? A Debate on Secession within the European Union
- Xavier Cuadras-Morat O
Cuadras-Morat o, Xavier (2016). Catalonia: A New Independent State in Europe? A
Debate on Secession within the European Union. New York: Routledge.
- Guinjoan Marc
V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v9
- Michael Coppedge
Coppedge, Michael, et al. (2019). V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset
v9. Retrieved from https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemcy19
The Political Use of De Facto Referendums of Independence: The Case of Catalonia', Representation, 1-19
- Jaume L Opez
- Marc Sanjaume-Calvet
L opez, Jaume, and Marc Sanjaume-Calvet (2020). 'The Political Use of De Facto
Referendums of Independence: The Case of Catalonia', Representation, 1-19.
Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00344893.2020.
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The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition: The Spanish Model
- Jose Montero
- Ignacio Ramon
- Lago
Montero, Jose Ramon, and Ignacio Lago (2011). 'The Politics and Memory of
Democratic Transition: The Spanish Model', in Diego Muro and Gregorio
Alonso (eds.), The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition: The Spanish
Model. New York: Routledge, 41-70.
La confusi on nacional: La democracia española ante la crisis catalana
- Ignacio S Anchez-Cuenca
S anchez-Cuenca, Ignacio (2018). La confusi on nacional: La democracia española
ante la crisis catalana. Madrid: Catarata.
La confusión nacional: La democracia española ante la crisis catalana. Madrid: Catarata
- Sánchez-Cuenca
- Colino César