The Multiple Spanish Elections of April and May 2019: The Impact of Territorial and Left-right Polarisation

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Spain
• elections
• Catalonia question
• VOX
• regional election
• European parliament election

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/10.1080/13608746.2020.1756612

Notes

1. Article 2 of the Spanish Constitution states that ‘[the Constitution] is based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation, the common and indivisible homeland of all Spaniards; it recognises and guarantees the right to self-government of the nationalities and regions of which it is composed and the solidarity among them all.’

2. Compromis, Bildu and Nueva Canarias also agreed to support the vote against Rajoy.

3. Elections have been considered depending on data available.

4. Unfortunately, there are no data for the territorial axis in the CIS barometers.

5. 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).

6. This distinction refers to those Autonomous Communities that were not created based on the autonomies in the Second Republic (Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia) or by the requisite clause in the Constitution to do so (Andalusia).

7. 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).

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.