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The handling of linguistic diversity in the Basque Autonomous Community has been an area of constant political debate since the establishment of the Basque-Spanish co-official linguistic regime and the introduction of a process to revitalize Euskara (the Basque language) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Much of that debate has materialized in claims related to the language rights of citizens. This paper analyzes discourses about language rights in three political organizations, the Basque Nationalist Party (EAJ-PNV), the Abertzale Left (Ezker Abertzalea), and the Popular Party (PP), through an analysis of their electoral programs for the Basque Parliament from the first elections to the present day (1980-2016). Although the linguistic system of the Basque Autonomous Community seems consolidated, the analysis has shown that policy proposals are profoundly conditioned by the form of understanding language rights and that these in turn are influenced by distinct national projects. EAJ-PNV advocates for an effective equal opportunity to choose between Spanish and Basque in all spheres of use, motivated by its ethnocultural conception of the Basque Nation. The Ezker Abertzalea demands the right to live in Basque throughout the Basque Country with Basque as the common language of its plurilingual state project. The PP focuses on the negative side of language rights based on the common language status of Spanish and the right of citizens to remain monolingual in Spanish.

Wartime violence and authoritarian repression against civilians take various forms. Past research has explored the causes and consequences of violence, but no previous work simultaneously assessed the long-term effects of different types of violence on political identities. This paper contends that indiscriminate attacks can reinforce ingroup identity, whereas the role of civilian agency in selective violence may have a detrimental impact. Equipped with original data capturing municipality-level exposure to both selective and indiscriminate violence during the Spanish civil war (1936–1939) in Biscay (Basque Country), this study examines its legacy on voting behavior (1983–2015). Results indicate that fascist airstrikes increased Basque nationalism while selective violence diminished the popularity of Basque parties. Individual and community-level evidence suggests that airstrikes fostered the intergenerational transmission of political attitudes. Violence can boost national identities, but it can also erode them: it depends on the type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of increasing political polarization, its analysis becomes crucial for the understanding of democratic dynamics. This paper presents a comprehensive research on measuring political polarization on X (Twitter) during election cycles in Spain, from 2011 to 2019. A wide comparative analysis is performed on algorithms used to identify and measure polarization or controversy on microblogging platforms. This analysis is specifically tailored towards publications made by official political party accounts during pre-campaign, campaign, election day, and the week post-election. Guided by the findings of this comparative evaluation, we propose a novel algorithm better suited to capture polarization in the context of political events, which is validated with real data. As a consequence, our research contributes a significant advancement in the field of political science, social network analysis, and overall computational social science, by providing a realistic method to capture polarization from online political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the concept of the impact area as the intersection between the common issues of the personal agenda and the public agenda. Expanding the concept of agenda-setting effects, which focuses mainly on the relation between the public and media agendas, we have examined the congruity of the public agenda and the personal agenda as a contingent condition for the strength of these effects. The concept also distinguishes between the top-priority issues of the public and personal agendas, setting out that the general public's search for information about these top-priority issues highlights the need for orientation. We used data from Spain to focus on the national elections (2011, 2015 and 2019), plus the beginning of the pandemic (2020). The study includes a content analysis of the El País daily newspaper for the four periods and a variety of surveys and representative electoral barometers. To those data we have added an analysis of the main search topics on Google Trends for each of the four years. The results reveal that variations in the relationship between the public and personal agendas are linked to the strength of the agenda-setting effect between the media and public agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years we have witnessed a resurgence of populism, which has relied on the virality of social networks to deepen its roots in society and spread its ideas. This paper analyses the populist strategies used by all parties to viralise their messages in the online environment, regardless of ideology. The present research has also examined the possible existence of complementary strategies used by the parties' organisational profiles and those of their leaders. To this end, a content analysis has been carried out regarding the publications made on Twitter during the 2019 election campaign. The posts have been delimited to those made by the parties and candidates that attained the highest percentage of representation in the Congress of Deputies, which include the PSOE, PP, Vox, and Unidas Podemos. The findings show that all the parties under study resorted to this type of strategy. The parties closest to centre of the political spectrum, both right and left, used mostly a populist strategy aimed predominantly at attacking their adversaries, while Vox and Unidas Podemos articulated their discourse beyond this argument, with Vox appealing to the emotions of the nation and Podemos positioning itself as the peoples' advocate. Furthermore, a complementary strategy used by both the parties and their leaders has been identified, which fosters the expansion of these kinds of populist ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ámbitos: Revista de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades is the property of Asociacion de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper shows that the role of national electoral dynamics on regional elections is highly mediated by institutional and electoral constraints at the regional level. Using data on statewide parties' electoral competition in regional and national elections in Spain and Italy, results show that the contamination of regional elections is lower in regions where decentralization has travelled further and where strong regionalist parties dominate electoral competition. The paper also shows that these two channels -more regional authority and more regionalist competition- shape the regional manifestos of statewide parties by increasing their pro-regional positions. These findings represent a contribution to a better understanding of the extent to which regional elections are a separate electoral arena from the national one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the potential of elections to change our emotions and modify the relevance that voters assign to self-interest and group-identity issues. We examine this question by analyzing the 1998–2016 period of the Catalan and Basque regional elections. The analysis exploits that Basques pushed to leave Spain in the early 2000s, and Catalans pursued independence about fifteen years later. When the separatist goal emerges, two issues gain relevance. First, there is a significant rise of identity politics, associated with the territory's culture and language, to the detriment of other issues that traditionally explain vote choice, such as the left-right ideology, the degree of regional autonomy, or the economic discontent. Second, the territory becomes more divisive, big cities align against dominant separatist parties, and rural areas align with independentists. We conclude that material self-interests dilute and group-identity factors emerge to determine vote decisions in times of national dissolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Derecho Politico is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since the entry of the far-right party VOX into the Spanish government administrations in 2018, Spain's political scene has gone through a deep transformation. The disparity in opinions among the different parties concerning migration seems to tear the country's democratic foundation apart. This paper is a study of the language and discursive strategies used by VOX's leader, Santiago Abascal, articulating the party's populist propaganda for a united country to "make Spain great again." The analysis was grounded on the theoretical underpinnings of Wodak's (2001) discursive strategies and Van Dijk's (1993) "Us" vs. "Them" framework. The data were based on Abascal's closing political campaign speech during the Madridlenian elections, which was televised in May 2021. The 30-minute video recording was transcribed, annotated, coded, and analyzed. The findings suggest a pattern of discursive practices aimed at diminishing other political parties and their representatives, vilify immigrants, and impugn government measures that were against VOX's authoritarian conservatism and nationalism. There was a predominant use of predication strategies to positively present VOX while denigrating its political rivals. Referential/nomination strategies were also used to divide the society between in-groups and out-groups. Strongly embedded in these strategies were perlocutionary acts used to incite hate toward the out-groups and evoke fear and anxiety toward the in-group, strategically employed as tools to gain votes in the elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I estimate the effects of first rank using a regression discontinuity design in the context of three multimember district (MMD) elections, in Korea, Spain, and Japan. By analyzing MMD elections, I can estimate the effects of first rank separately from those of incumbency because there are multiple winners with different ranks. The results indicate that there is no first-rank effect on the outcomes of subsequent elections in any of the three cases. However, I do find evidence that achieving first rank increases candidates' probabilities of running for and winning higher office. In addition, I show that the first-rank effect on political advancement is likely to be driven by political parties, not by voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Aula Abierta. Revista de Investigación, Formación e Innovación en Educación (RIFIE) is the property of Universidad de Oviedo, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper brings together the literature on far right parties, medievalism and opinion leadership in order to more closely interrogate the memory politics of the far right. We address two broad questions: what does the mobilization of distant-past events do in far right discourse? And how do these memories circulate online? We unpack one specific case study: the mobilization of the topic 'La Reconquista' (The Reconquest) among the computer-mediated networks of one Europe's newest national-populist parties: Spain's VOX. First, we show three strategies through which the Reconquest trope reproduced a conservative historiography that creates a transhistorical, exclusionary and Catholic Spanish nation: the creation of memory sites, the glorification of heroes and a specifically antagonistic memory. Second, we show that the one-word nature of the historical narrative, through its Twitter circulation, gave it a crucial ability to mobilize in the context of an election. Finally, drawing from opinion leader theory we show how these Reconquest narratives were put forward by traditional elite actors such as political parties and newspapers, but relied on the role of ordinary citizens to spread and circulate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of El Profesional de la Información is the property of EPI SCP and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Ever since the spectacular boom and bust cycle of the Spanish real estate industry, endemic corruption at the local level has become a widely recognized problem in the national public discourse. In an effort to expose an under-explored political determinant, this paper investigates the effect of local and regional alignment in fomenting corruption at the Spanish municipal level. To do so, we construct an ample panel dataset on the prevalence of corrupt practices by local politicians, which is employed to test the possible impact of partisan alignment in three consecutive joint municipal and regional elections. Findings show aligned municipalities to be more corrupt than non-aligned ones, an effect that is further associated with absolute majorities at both levels of government and higher capital transfers. By contrast, we also show that "throwing the rascals out" could be an effective strategy for curbing the corrupt practices of aligned municipalities. This indicates that the democratic political process may be effective in corruption control if agreements can be reached to remove corrupt politicians or parties from power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Migraciones is the property of Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Instituto Universitario de Estudios sobre Migraciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Iberian & Latin American Research is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Palabra Clave is the property of Universidad de la Sabana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of El Profesional de la Información is the property of EPI SCP and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyses the 2019 local, regional, European and April general elections in Spain. The constitutional crisis in Catalonia in 2017, the motion of no-confidence leading to the new Socialist government and the emergence of a radical right-wing party, VOX, all led to Spanish politics becoming more polarised. This paper also discusses polarisation from both the left-right and the territorial perspectives, intimately linked in Spain both for historical reasons but also because of agency decisions during the period analysed. Finally, the article shows the electoral results, government formation processes and political implications of polarisation in a non-institutionalised party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the context, campaign and main determinants of how Catalans voted in the 2015 regional election. The elections were exceptional because the incumbent and the remaining Catalan nationalist parties framed the contest as a de facto referendum on secession. In this paper we scrutinise whether attitudes towards independence affected vote choice and whether they eclipsed other traditional significant vote-driving factors such as the state of the economy or government performance. Results show that, although the independence issue became a major determinant of vote choice, the elections did not become a pure plebiscite on secession, since voters also used their vote to hold the regional government accountable for its past performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an account of the co-constitutive interaction between spatial and discursive dynamics in present-day politics. I focus on Podemos, a recently established party in Spain that was able to secure 20% of votes in the 2016 general election. Building on critical geography's political understanding of space, together with cultural and discourse studies' insights on place representation, formulation, and embodiment, I examine Podemos' parliamentary performances, as well as their different moral evaluations by opposing parties. Throughout my analysis, I show, first, that the transgressive nature of certain acts is intrinsically linked to the particular spatial relations enforced in institutional contexts, and second, how, in their discursive struggles over common sense, different actors consistently mobilize space as a moralizing agent. The different strategies adopted reveal a tension between dominant and emergent ways of 'doing politics' that parallels competing visions of the relationship, in contemporary Spain, between civic and institutional spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the application of machine learning techniques, this paper aims to estimate the importance of messages with ideological load during the elections held in Spain on May 24th, 2015 posted by Twitter's users, as well as other variables associated with the publication of these types of messages. Our study collected and analysed 24,900 tweets associated to two of the main trending topics' hashtags (#24M and #Elections2015) used in the election day and build a predictive model to infer the ideological orientation for the messages which made use of these hashtags during Election Day. This approach allows us to classify the ideological orientation of all collected tweets, instead of only tweets that explicitly express their ideological or partisan preferences in the messages. Using the ideological orientation for all tweets predicted by our model, it was possible to identify how messages with a defined ideological load were pushed forward by users with leftist tendencies. We also observed a relationship between these messages and the partisan orientation of those who published them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1978, an important process of decentralization in terms of regional competences has been taking place in Spain. In consequence, the behaviour of the regional and local administration has obtained an increasing relevant role. This process has a direct impact on the performance of politicians both at local and regional level, and on the results of elections. Recent data on elections show that national parties have lost the voting race at local elections. Moreover, at the same time as the economic boom in this country in the 2000s, there was also a boom in political corruption at the local level. Using a database that includes municipal data from 2004 to 2011 in Spain, this paper evaluates whether national parties lose votes at national elections due to the wrongdoing of their local candidates. Moreover, we focus on partisan effects, splitting the analysis according to the two main political parties in Spain. Our study resembles an experimental design, which yields two main conclusions. First, local corruption affects significantly the parties' votes at national level, being the magnitude of the effect around one percentage point in absolute values. Second and interestingly, the sign of the results also depends on whether the corruption is on the right or the left wing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Jurídica de la Universidad Autonóma de Madrid is the property of Dykinson SL and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We define two indices with which to measure the concentration and fragmentation of political power. Concentration (or fragmentation) indices comply with the cardinality property if they are based on mathematical distance, which makes homogeneous comparisons possible because the indices maintain proportions of values. These indices also operate under the unit interval, so the measurements can be interpreted as percentages, and the differences and ratios between measurements have an understandable meaning. Our indices indeed comply with the cardinality property, which allows us to reinterpret the well-known Gallagher disproportionality index as the transformation of mathematical distance. Our concentration index can be interpreted as the large political party's share of power, while our fragmentation index determines the smaller parties' share. We apply both indices to election results over the last four decades from the UK, Germany and Spain, revealing that vote fragmentation has significantly increased in Germany and Spain, but it does not have a steady trend in the UK. Further, whilst seat fragmentation has been observed in Germany and the UK since 2000, this phenomenon is more recent in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociológicas (RIPS) is the property of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Politai. Revista de Ciencia Política is the property of Asociacion Civil Politai and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

With the 2011 ceasefire declaration the Basque patriotic left (IA) has committed itself more firmly to constitutional politics. Concurrently, Spain has experienced an upsurge in the popularity of new political parties in the historically two party dominant general elections. The emergence of a political challenger on the left of the political spectrum (Podemos) may pose an opportunity or a threat to the IA's unilateral strategy, as the parties have numerous points of ideological concurrence. This paper analyses how the IA seeks to translate its strategies into mainstream constitutional politics, by exploring how it responds to the question posed by Podemos – ally, competitor, or both? Using an historical institutionalist approach, the conditions at two critical junctures – those surrounding the formation of new political parties during the democratic transition period and the more recent change in the electoral landscape – are compared to assess the initial impact of Podemos on IA cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general elections of 2015 in Spain were elections of change. Two new parties for which voters had no previous historical reference points burst onto the parliamentary scene. Two (partially) opposed theories vie to offer an explanation as to how voters build their aggregate electoral expectations. In this paper, we investigate which mechanism has the greatest influence on the formation of expectations: published opinion or social interactions. Likewise, we also study if there is an ideological bias in the voters' perception of the future results of the electoral battle. Based on analysis of microdata from a survey (sample size = 14,262) conducted in Spain on the occasion of the general elections of 2015, we provide evidence: firstly, that the published surveys are the main source used by voters to configure their aggregate expectations; and secondly, that the interpretation and projection that voters make about reality is not neutral, but strongly influenced by their own beliefs and preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The infotainment format offers candidates an informal setting to show a more personal side of themselves to the electorate, opening themselves up to potential voters. An example of media hybridisation, social networks users can immediately comment on infotainment television programmes, a process known as second screening. These second screeners tend to be especially active in politics. This paper analyses the immediate emotional reaction of these users as they watch infotainment programmes that air during the campaign or pre-campaign seasons and feature political candidates as guests. We have confirmed that second screeners react more emotionally towards the candidate when his or her party is mentioned, and less emotionally when the host displays an aggressive attitude through his or her non-verbal communication. When issues related to the candidate's personal lives are discussed, users' emotional reactions improve slightly. The relevance of this research stems from the fact that we are witnessing the consolidation of a politics that increasingly strays from ideological questions, and instead focuses on more emotional and personal issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of IC: Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación is the property of Universidad de Sevilla, Departamento de Periodismo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of IC: Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación is the property of Universidad de Sevilla, Departamento de Periodismo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

What explains the variation in how European citizens of diverse origins are politically incorporated in the member states of residence? This paper argues that immigrant groups' status in the host society plays an important role in political party responses to immigrants' political participation. Drawing on the case of Romanian and British candidacies in the Spanish local elections from 2011, the paper finds that the level of competition between parties is the key mechanism for incorporating candidates from a positively/neutrally perceived group. Instead, a greater level of ethnic diversity encourages the incorporation of candidates from the negatively perceived group. To demonstrate this, the paper uses an original data-set with the Romanian and British candidates in a large number of Spanish localities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the evolution of the electoral use of Instagram in Spain, from its origins as a political communication channel to its current consolidation. A content analysis of eleven variables is applied to the formal, spatial, personal, thematic-discursive and interactive dimensions of the activity carried out on this social network by the candidates for the presidency of the Spanish Government of the parties that ran with the highest vote expectations in the General Elections of December 2015, June 2016 and April and November 2019 (571 posts). The results show the consolidation of Instagram as a political communication tool and the growing interest of the parties in it, as well as the increasing importance of short videos as a format. The electoral use of this social network is carried out with an increasingly mobilising intention, as evidenced both by the themes chosen and, above all, by the purpose of the publications, the spatial context represented and the hashtags used. The growing characterisation of candidates as leaders of the masses is also evidence of the personalisation of political leadership that occurs in this medium during electoral campaigns. Finally, the phenomenon of polarisation and the presence of populist stylistic traits are also beginning to be noticeable, as reflected in the increase in political issues and negative emotional appeals in the messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies changes in voting preferences over election campaigns. Building on the literature on spatial models and valence issues, we study whether (1) ideological distance to political parties, (2) assessments of party competence to handle different policy issues, and (3) voter-updated candidate evaluations are factors that explain shifts in voter choices in the weeks preceding the election. To test our hypotheses, we use data from three survey panels conducted for the 2008, 2011 and 2015 Spanish general elections. Our findings show that valence factors are more influential than ideological indifference to account for campaign conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zer: Journal of Communication Studies / Revista de Estudios de Comunicacion / Komunikazio Ikasketen Aldizkaria is the property of Universidad del Pais Vasco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study analyzes the use of Telegram as an electoral communication tool in Spain, focusing on the messages sent by the five major parties in the country (PSOE, PP, Vox, Unidas Podemos and Ciudadanos) during the campaigns corresponding to the general elections of April 28 and November 10, 2019. This research paper steps outside this somewhat still narrow area of methodology by combining two different research techniques on a methodological triangulation: traditional content analysis and data mining processes using Python. Results, which show how political parties in Spain use Telegram mainly as a mobilization tool while expressing closeness with the candidate, are contextualized thanks to the implementation of Big Data analysis techniques that improve and allow for an in-depth investigation and understanding of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voting for Populist Radical Parties (PRPs) in Europe has been a frequent subject of study in recent decades. However, little research has analysed the common factors between ideologically opposed PRPs. In this article we fill this gap in the literature from an ecological perspective at the municipal level. Using the cases of Podemos and Vox in Spain, we analyse whether the same characteristics at the municipal level explain the electoral performance of both parties. To address this question we use the results of the four general elections in which both parties have run. The results confirm an archetype of municipal-level characteristics that explain the success of both PRPs in Spain. These parties had more support in (sub-)urban contexts; with high levels of political disaffection and high incomes. Furthermore, we compare these findings with the pre-existing literature for their European peers and test the peculiarity of the Spanish case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will analyze, as an example of political discourse, the songs used by Spain's two main political parties in the 2008 general elections. Just like other texts used in political electoral discourse (such as speeches, interviews, meetings, posters, advertisements or videos), these songs form a part of a public and ideological discourse aimed at the election of a candidate. The whole of the candidate's discourse is aimed at convincing the electorate that she/he and his/her party are the best choice (legitimation), while the opposing candidate is the worst (delegitimation). In this paper, I will analyze how this strategy, quite typical in political ideological electoral discourse, is put into practice in the two songs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Can terrorist attacks be timed to change the outcome of democratic elections? In this paper, we analyze the electoral impact of the terrorist attacks of March 11, 2004, in Madrid. Studies using individual level postelectoral survey data reach contradictory conclusions. We propose an alternative approach. Since the bombings took place only three days before the 2004 congressional election, we can find a control group of individuals who cast their vote before the terrorist attacks. The results indicate that the attacks had an important electoral impact, rejecting the hypothesis that the identity of the winner was unaffected by the terrorist attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2004, an al Qaeda affiliate killed 191 civilians in Madrid. Spain's general election three days later confounded pollsters' expectations; the incumbent Partido Popular was ousted by the challenging Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol (psoe), a party committed to withdrawal from Iraq. This manuscript examines the notion that this was a strategic terrorist success. The first strategic form considered is coercive bargaining. The paper finds that al Qaeda is not a credible coercive agent and debunks the popular myth that Spanish voters entered a coercive bargain with the network. The paper also considers the attacks through the strategic frameworks of terrorist advertising, provocation, regime destabilization, and morale building. It finds that the attacks' only strategic achievement was building morale. Finally, the paper provides a multi-factor explanation of how the Madrid bombings contributed to the psoe victory despite their lack of strategic impact. The upshot of the analysis is that there is little reason to believe such electoral impact is replicable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Estudios Políticos is the property of Centro de Estudios Politicos y Constitucionales and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Historia 396 is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Instituto de Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The 2016 general election was the result of the incapacity of Spanish political parties to agree on the formation of a government following the previous parliamentary election six months earlier. The paper begins by examining how and why this process failed, focusing on institutional and contextual factors, especially those related to the emergence of Podemos and Ciudadanos in the Spanish political arena. Also explained are the negotiation strategies of the different parties, the electoral campaign and the results of the subsequent 2016 general election. These results show that, on the right, most vote changes went from Ciudadanos to the Popular Party while, in the case of the new pre-electoral coalition of UP, former Izquierda Unida voters were more prone to desert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2015 general election marked the end of the two-party system that had existed in Spain since the restoration of democracy. Two new parties, ‘Podemos’ and ‘Ciudadanos’, entered the national arena for the first time and together obtained 34.6 per cent of the vote. This paper describes this election’s context and electoral results by analysing the individual determinants behind the change to the Spanish party system. The results indicate that economic factors predominantly explain the votes for the traditional parties, the PP and PSOE. On the other hand, political factors help distinguish why some voters remained ‘loyal’ to the traditional parties and others switched to the new formations. While Podemos switchers were mainly politically disaffected left-wing voters, electoral support for Ciudadanos came from younger and ideologically moderate voters who had lower levels of political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most research has analysed election-orderness by looking at electoral behaviour, this article looks instead at political parties and political programs in the case of the Spanish 2019 European elections. With the collapse of its two-party system and challenger parties on the rise, this paper analyses how Spanish parties addressed topics in their political programs, using content and political discourse analysis. The article argues that the traditional classification of first and second-order elections is no longer well-equipped to depict the increasingly politicised and Europeanised political parties. This finding indicates a new way of addressing topics in Spain, a 'twilight-zone', in which the division between first and second-order elections may be seen less as a binary distinction and more as part of a continuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]