A bourgeois story? The class basis of Catalan independentism

ABSTRACT

In Catalonia and beyond, the recent upheaval of secessionist mobilizations has challenged not only extant territorial frameworks and integration processes but also one’s understandings around nationalism and its social bases of support. Upper-class and bourgeois sectors of the population have been traditionally considered as overrepresented within the Catalan nationalist constituency. The study’s data on the social background of supporters instead indicate an interclass constituency behind the procés that unfolded under the post-2007 Great Recession. As the movement for Catalan self-determination and independence became a mass phenomenon, it broadened the traditional constituency of Catalan nationalism and encompassed large sectors of the population, including the working classes. Looking at the intersection of positions on nation and class, it is suggested that cross-class alliances were crucial in accounting for the surge of support for independence that has been observed in Catalonia since 2010.

KEYWORDS:

• secession
• social class
• Catalonia
• Great Recession
• nationalism

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank Erika Jaráiz, Nieves Lagares, Ramón Máiz, José M. Rivera and the team of the Political Research unit at the University of Santiago de Compostela for kindly providing the survey data from their ‘Estudio Postelectoral Elecciones Autonómicas en Cataluña 2015’. The authors thank Giuliano Amato, Laszlo Bruszt, Michael Keating, Mario Pianta and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions. They are also grateful to the organizers of and participants at the workshop ‘Spain: Social Movements between Past and Present’ (University of Cambridge, June 2018) and ‘The Political Consequences of Inequality: Inequalities, Territorial Politics, Nationalism’ conference (Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, November 2018) for their constructive remarks.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

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

Notes

1 See https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/a-peculiar-bourgeois-nationalism-brings-spain-to-the-brink-1.3260767; and https://www.wsj.com/articles/middle-class-catalans-not-workers-drive-push-for-independence-1507714203.

2 Even if support for independence proved resilient to economic recovery (Bel et al., 2019).

3 Several scandals affected the credibility of Mariano Rajoy's government and the ruling Partido Popular, such as the publication in 2013 of the handwritten account ledgers by former party treasurer Luís Bárcenas (supposedly associated with black money). Importantly, the conservative Catalan nationalist Convergència Democràtica has been plagued by a string of scandals, too, including Jordi Pujol's confession of tax evasion and money laundering via secret Swiss and Andorran bank accounts (Miley, 2017).

4 The target sample of the ‘Estudio Postelectoral Elecciones Autonómicas en Cataluña 2015’ consists of Catalans over 18 years old. The fieldwork was conducted between 16 November and 23 December 2015 (the Catalan election took place on 27 September 2015). Following a proportional allocation, quotas by sex, age and province were used (margin of error ±2.62%). The questionnaire was administered by interviewers via telephone using CATI software (Rivera Otero et al., 2017, pp. 11–12).

5 Alternatively, we grouped the vote for pro-independence forces (Junts pel Sí and Candidatura d’Unitat Popular) versus no openly pro-independence parties (centre-right liberal Ciudadanos (Cs), conservative Partido Popular (PP), social-democratic PSC/PSOE, left-wing coalition Catalunya Sí Que es Pot (CSQP), conservative regionalist Unió) in a dummy variable. However, the level of correlation with support for the dummy of support for the independence procés is very high (Pearson's r = 0.90). The categories null/blank/non voted/voted for other minority parties are recoded as missing.

6 Support for the independence procés is highly correlated with other proxies of independence, including preferred form of state and the Linz–Moreno question on national and regional identity are highly intercorrelated (Pearson's r > 0.70) (Holesch, 2016).

7 As the level of correlation between education and income is only moderate (Pearson's r = 0.43), rather than merging them in a common indicator, we keep them separate throughout.

8 CUP stands for Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (Popular Unity Candidacy), ‘a radical left-wing and pro-independence party consisting of autonomous local-level assemblies’, which gained 10 MPs in the 2015 Catalan election (della Porta et al., 2017, p. 185). The CiU coalition, which consisted of the conservative Unió and the centre-liberal Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC), split amid polarization over independence and corruption scandals. The main pro-independence parties (ERC and CDC), along with major civil society organizations such as the Assemblea Nacional Catalana and Òmnium Cultural, put forward a joint list (Junts pel Sí, JxSí) that won the 2015 Catalan election, securing 62 seats. As families of non-Catalan origin are more likely to develop Spanish-centric cultural frames of reference (Fernández-i-Marín & López, 2010; Miley, 2007), we can take language as a proxy for origin. As expected, support for pro-independence parties is particularly high among Catalan-speaking working classes, amounting to at least 80% among people who speak only or mostly Catalan and are unemployed, have completed only low levels of education, or live in a household with a low income level, respectively.

9 Initially measured through a 0–10 scale (Rivera Otero et al., 2017), ideological self-placement is recoded into a three-category variable (left, centre, right).

10 However, there is not a significant and robust interactive effect between social class and left–right self-placement in the model specifications in Tables A5–A7 in Appendix A in the supplemental data online.

11 We choose the default specification, so coordinates are returned in standard normalization (i.e., singular values divided by the square root of the mass). The first two dimensions of the multiple correspondence analysis with the Burt matrix and adjustments explains at least 95.6% of the total inertia among the Catalan independentists (and 94.6% among the referendum supporters).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Universita e della Ricerca (MIUR) and the Scuola Normale Superiore under grant agreements ‘Critical Young Europeans’ (CRY_OUT) and ‘Democracy in the EU and the Potential of a European Society’ (DEMOS).