Affective and Territorial Polarisation: The Impact on Vote Choice in Spain

ABSTRACT

What is the effect of affective polarisation on vote choice? Despite the growing interest in affective polarisation, scholars still do not fully understand the relationship between partisan affective polarisation and political behaviour. Crucially, most existing studies have assumed, often by default, that affective polarisation mainly occurs along a single politicised partisan identity. This article addresses the hitherto neglected relationship between affective polarisation and vote choice in Spain, where distrust between different and opposite groups occurs both on ideological and territorial terms. Using rich panel data, the study findings show that both affective polarisation types are significant predictors of vote choice. While affectively partisan-polarised voters are more likely to support the left, affectively polarised voters on the territorial dimension are more likely to support the right.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective polarisation
• electoral behaviour
• second dimension
• territorial conflict
• Catalonia
• vote choice
• identity politics

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. See also Robles et al. (2020). As for the effect of secession on affective polarisation, see also Balcells, Fernández-Albertos and Kuo (2021).

2. The majority of research on the consequences of affective polarisation focused on other outcomes, such as the relationship between citizens and polarisation among the elites (Diermeier & Li 2019). Notable exceptions include studies on the effect of affective polarisation on multi-party systems, such as Wagner (2020) and Reiljan and Ryan (2021).

3. Although the sub-sample varies across regions, the survey includes respondents from all regions (with the exception of Ceuta and Melilla). The last part of the empirical analysis employs the sub-sample in Catalonia with approximately 400 cases across waves.

4. Correlation between the different indicators is always higher than 0.7 and statistically significant at the 99 per cent level. The online Appendix includes further information and full estimates.

5. To avoid recency efects, the order of the groups was randomised.

6. Although the Basques versus the rest of the distribution has a small right tail, differences are significantly different from the distribution for Andalusia and Madrid. Notably, despite the lack of similar indicators in past surveys, the result on ‘Basques vs the rest’ was likely to be different a few years ago. The saliency of the territorial dimension in relation to Basque Country has significantly decreased over the last few years, which may have exerted an impact on this territorial affective polarisation indicator.

7. As previously mentioned, the indicator of partisan affective polarisation weighs values for each party vote share at the national level. In other words, partisan affective polarisation does not consider territorial affective polarisation. Thus, the effect of the latter may be underestimated. A similar logic can be applied to Basque Country. However, the potential problem is much more limited, because negative affective polarisation towards the Basques (or the opposite) is limited, and the sample size collected in this region is much smaller. Nevertheless, the results remain robust if they are excluded.

8. The E-Dem dataset shows that the average left-right position of individuals identified with Cs is 5.9, while that of PP identifiers is 7.2. According to the 2019 post-election barometer published by the Spanish Centre for Sociological Studies (CIS, n. 3248), 30 per cent of Cs voters in 2016 voted for the PP in April 2019. In addition, and since the E-DEM survey identifies only 93 individuals that move from PP/Cs to VOX, both parties were merged to facilitate the empirical analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Toni Rodon

Toni Rodon is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political and Social Science and member of the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). His work focuses on political behaviour, electoral participation and topics of political economy from a historical perspective.