Two-bloc Logic, Polarisation and Coalition Government: The November 2019 General Election in Spain

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the role played by polarisation in the Spanish party system. It first analyses the failure in the attempts to form a government after the 28 April 2019 general election in Spain. It shows how polarisation and short-term calculations made government formation impossible and led to a new general election in November that year. The article also describes how prior to the electoral campaign, the exhumation of Francisco Franco’s body and the riots in Catalonia, which added to the saliency of territorial conflict, fostered votes for the radical right-wing party Vox. It will also be shown how the election results led to a fragmented and more polarised Congress. Finally, the article discusses the formation of the first minority coalition government in the recent democratic history of Spain – one made up of the PSOE and UP – its structure and its potential implications for the Spanish party system.

KEYWORDS:

• PSOE
• PP
• Unidas Podemos
• Ciudadanos
• Vox
• Catalonia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2020.1857085.

Notes

1. The Dalton index is calculated as follows:

$PI=\sqrt{{\sum }^{\left(partyvoteshar{e}_i\right)}\ast {(\frac{\left[partyL-Rscor{e}_i-partysystemaverageL-Rscore\right]}{5})}^2}$

Where i represents the individual parties and the L-R score refers to the left-right scale in the continuum.

2. Elections have been considered depending on the available data. After 2016 the question about the nationalism index is not included by the CIS.

3. Also with CHA, the left regionalist party of Aragón and Iniciativa del Pueblo Andaluz (IPA).

4. The predicted probability of voting is based on logistic regressions for each party, controlling for gender, age, education and ideology (left-right scale), and adjusted to the average (See Online Appendix at https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2020.1857085).

5. The predicted probability of voting is based on the same logistic regressions as in Figure 2.

6. The effective number of parties is calculated as follows:

$ENP=\frac{1}{\sum _{i=1}^n{p}_i^2}$

where p is the proportion of votes obtained by party i in the election. The Effective Number of Parliamentary Parties replaces p with the share of seats obtained by each party (Laakso & Taagepera 1979).

7. Volatility has been calculated using the Pedersen Index. This is one of the most common measures of aggregate stability and variation in party systems (Bartolini & Mair 1990) and is quite straightforward to calculate: all the votes (p) received by each party (w) at election (pw_t) are subtracted from all the votes received by each party at election t-1(pw_t-1). The figure distinguishes between traditional parties and new parties depending on whether the party had had seats in both elections.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pablo Simón

Pablo Simón is an Assistant Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. PhD in Political Science (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), he has been a visiting fellow at Université de Montreal and a post-doc at Université Libre de Bruxelles. He specialises in electoral systems, party systems, fiscal federalism and political participation. His most recent publications have appeared in West European Politics, Political Studies, Publius, Social Sciences Quarterly and Acta Politica