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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]

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]