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The variance in electoral magnitude and in district malapportionment is relevant to understand the political consequences of the spanish electoral system. This paper proposes a threefold classification of districts into subsystems and validates it by its diverging results in fractionalization and proportionality. The inequality of electoral magnitudes places a special overrepresentation bonus on certain parties; and the same happens with malapportionment. Both things accumulate into a geographical electoral price which results in a conservative bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local women's councils are strategic places to channel women's participation and demands in order to promote gender policies at the local level. Nevertheless, as well as other participatory mechanisms, their dynamics could be biased according to participant's characteristics and the institutional agenda of local government. In this paper we try to show evidences about theses bias trough a survey carry out among women's associations in five Spanish cities. Results show that the participatory dynamic of local women's councils produces two kind of bias: an inclusiveness bias according to the traits of women's organizations, favouring those more oriented towards political activism; and a substantive bias according to the issues discussed, favouring those close to the local government agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes over, from an empirical perspective, one of the classic concerns of normative theories of democracy: political community size and citizen participation. Although it focuses on voter turnout, this paper makes a simple question: why and how the political body size can influence the political behaviour of its residents. For this purpose, we examine, from an aggregate approach, the relationship between "size" and turnout in different types of elections in Andalusia, in the period 1999-2011. Our ecological analysis of participation, by using multi-regression techniques, shows that population size is the main "civic" characteristic of localities. However, other characteristics of local contexts, such as income and subsidized agrarian population, are positively related to participation. Our results suggest that individual theories of voting behaviour should also take into account the contextual factor when offering their conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]