The Decline of Traditional Partisanship in Spanish Municipalities: Corruption, Inequality and Territorial Mobilisation

Abstract

Between 2008 and 2014, Spain experienced a severe recession, which had a deep impact on its political system. Scholars have mainly focused on transformations occurred at the national level but have neglected changing equilibria at the local level. This paper shows that in Spain the role of traditional parties as mediators of local interests has declined and suggests that they have to face increasing competition coming from citizens’ lists, which label themselves as ‘local’ or ‘non-partisan’. By relying on an original dataset and quantitative analysis, this paper aims to understand to what extent these new forces are influenced by other forms of territorial mobilisation represented by regionalist parties and whether corruption and inequality, two factors that are crucial in Southern European societies, may also explain part of their success.

ORCID

Eliška Drápalová http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2402-1159

Notes

1 Podemos, created before 2014 EP elections, did not run in 2015 local elections but encouraged the creation of local civic lists.

2 Gini coefficients are available for 665 out of 752 municipalities.

3 We also focus on 2015 because data for control and independent variables in previous election rounds have a high number of missing data.

4 We consider Podemos vote share in the EP elections as a good proxy, both elections are close to each other (EP was first) and both are considered elections with ‘second-order’ effects.

5 The use of robust standard errors is appropriate since they do not substantially differ from classical standard errors (King and Roberts 2015).

6 The average result of Podemos was 6.9% in municipalities which did not experience corruption and 8.6% in those that did.

7 For instance, as shown by Vampa (2016b: 123) Convergència i Unió (CiU), ruling Catalonia since the late 1970s, sought to dominate the policy making process of the Autonomous Community by limiting the autonomy of provinces and municipalities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eliška Drápalová

Eliska Drapalova is a Postdoctoral fellow at Hertie School of Governance and Fritz-Thyssen fellow (2016–2018). Eliska Drapalova is the PI of the project titled: Varieties of Performance of Local Governments in New and Old Democracies financed by the Fritz-Thyssen foundation. Her research interests include political economy, local government, corruption, comparative politics and experimental research on corruption.

Davide Vampa

Davide Vampa is Lecturer in Politics at Aston University, Birmingham. His research interests focus on the link between territorial party politics and public policy. He recently published a monograph on the regional politics of welfare in Italy, Spain and Great Britain (Palgrave Macmillan). He has also published articles and book chapters on multi-level social policy, changing local representation and populist parties in Western Europe.