Mapping vote transition at the 2012 outset of the Catalan push for independence

ABSTRACT

In 2012 Catalan politics came to a standstill, and a push for independence was triggered by a huge pro-independence rally. That push led, in 2017, to the Spanish government taking over the Catalan government, and top Catalan officials either going into exile or being jailed, tried, and convicted for sedition in 2019. This article investigates how Catalans switched their vote between the elections held shortly before and just after that 2012 rally, with a novel ecological inference approach that groups geographical areas based on the similarity/switching of vote patterns and estimates the vote-switch patterns for individuals in each group. This approach allows one to map how individual vote-switch patterns vary in space and estimate how the support for parties in favour and against independence shifted between these two elections.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-determination
• ecological inference
• Geographic clusters
• political geography
• vote switching distribution
• regional geography

Disclosure statement

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