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Since the establishment of the first democratic local councils in 1979, ten municipal elections have taken place in Spain. In the few studies devoted to them, voting has habitually been explained by using national variables and following the wellknown model of second-order elections. In this paper we examine the validity of these conclusions by also considering local factors. We have estimated several hierarchical models using an ambitious datasetwhich includes both individual and contextual variables for a representative sample of Spanish municipalities between 1991 and 2011. Our empirical results are particularly interesting, with individual factors such as voters' ideology and contextual indicators such as the unemployment rate at the municipal level having a significant impact on the probability of voting for the incumbent mayor's party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a survey of international literature, this paper proposes the classification of citizens' preferences for redistribution in three categories that shape those preferences: imperatives of social justice, risk aversion and the institutional framework. With the data provided by the «Spanish Institute for Fiscal Studies Fiscal Barometer » an empirical application for the Spanish case is carried out. We use a probit model when the endogenous variable is dichotomized, and a linear model estimated through ordinary least squares when the dependent variable is an index constructed by principal components. The results, consistent with the theory and international experience, show that the preferences under study, homogeneously distributed throughout the country, are based on the three described determinants. In particular most of the variables are significantly associated with the description of the institutional framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain is one of the few countries in the European Union where Islam has had a historical role in the social and cultural construction of its identity. However, its modern history is marked by acts of repudiation of non-Christian cultures. Opinion polls indicate that certain groups of migrants from North Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, but mainly Muslims, are considered to be incompatible with the popular conception of Spanish identity. The reason for this perception is related to the social construction of the migrant as the «other to govern» by political, academic and media discourses. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that immigration law also plays a fundamental role in this strategy of «orientalization», i.e. the attribution of certain qualities to migrant groups (illegal, antisocial, criminal, unassimilable, terrorist), the aim of which is to legitimize the selective control of immigration. While meeting the guidelines provided by European authorities, the Spanish immigration and citizenship regime contributes to the construction of otherness, and therefore, to the political and legal (re)definition of what «being Spanish» means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The final years of the 1950s met in Catalonia and in the Basque Country a new impulse to their respective national movements. The Secretary General of the Movement organized in 1961 a series of written debates on the question. The paper «Cultural and political action to overcome divisive nationalist concepts» studied the Basque question, but its findings were never published. The debate was repeated in very similar terms in 1971 and 1973. The attempts of the speakers for a new regionalism to oppose what they considered separatism, foundered on the Basque society demands and the Franco's authorities refusal to reform the Spanish state centralist model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral democracy rests on a straightforward idea: citizens elect their fellow citizens to represent their interests. However, the explanation of voting behaviour is more complex than a probabilistic association between X and Y. A proper understanding demands a close examination of the three links of the causal chain of electoral behavior: parties' entry decisions, campaign strategies and voter predispositions. Without providing the causal mechanisms, regression coefficients are a black box. The goal of this paper is to examine these factors in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows the existence of a coordination dilemma in multi-level countries that hold elections for different parliaments, at different territorial levels, and with different electoral rules. With evidence from Spain, our analysis identifies interaction or contamination effects between national and sub-national electoral arenas that generate, just as in most mixed-member electoral systems, a centrifugal force that increases the number of electoral parties in national elections. The incentives that solve this coordination dilemma faced by small regional or local parties are theoretically discussed and empirically tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]