Search

This paper analyzes economic voting in decentralized contexts. The existence of several arenas of political competition allows for the appearance of vertical electoral contamination processes, implying that voters do not evaluate the performance of national and regional governments independently. Using the case of Spain in the period 1982-2008, it is demonstrated that this electoral contamination spreads from the national arena to the regional one, and not the other way round. However, electoral contamination tends to diminish as the process of decentralization takes place over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically reviews the conventional wisdom on the positive relationship between turnout and the electoral results of the PSOE in general elections in Spain. We highlight the existence of three causal mechanisms that give rise to different predictions about this correlation and therefore undermine the existing parsimonious thesis. Some of our arguments are empirically tested with aggregate district-level data corresponding to the ten general elections held to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use the method of counterfactual simulation to estimate the number of strategic votes transferred from the United Left (IU) to the Socialist Party (PSOE) in the last three Spanish general elections. The strategic voters we refer to are those who, in spite of IU being their first political preference, voted for the PSOE in order to attain representation benefits. The counterfactual simulation procedure is used to examine how the predicted individual probability of voting for a party changes when the strategic incentives at constituency level are removed. Our results lend support to the hypothesis that IU's electoral and parliamentary collapse was due in no small measure to the strategic behavior of its followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the way in which voting decision combines factors regarding government performance and the representative nature of the rulers. We have selected four Spanish regions with different degrees of nationalism and different parties at autonomous regional and central government levels. Voters make decisions in a two-dimensional space (ideology and nationalism). We calculate the relative importance of each dimension and show that ideology affects all voters equally, whereas the nationalist dimension only affects nationalists. Using conditional logit estimation techniques, we analyse a 1992 survey of carried out by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, which shows us that (i) there is a coat-tail voting effect, so that the party in power is rewarded or punished at autonomous regional level, (ii) nationalist voters are more indulgent than non nationalist voters when they have a negative opinion of the regional government performance, and (iii) the more exclusionist the nationalism, the stronger this effect will be. We consider that these effects are due to the fact that nationalists vote on the basis of representation rather than government performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]