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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]