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Electoral support for ethno-nationalist parties is based on the mobilisation of ethnic and cultural identities, which are generally understood to be primordial and, therefore, deeply rooted and highly stable. This paper poses the following question: to what extent do ethnic or national identities provide nationalist parties with a competitive advantage with regard to other parties, based on other types of allegiance, such as class or religion? In order to answer this question, the paper compares the incumbent nationalist and non-nationalist parties of the regional governments of Canada, Denmark, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom in the last five decades with respect to three empirical indicators: electoral performance, fluctuation of voting levels and how long governing parties stay in office. The results suggest that incumbent nationalist parties are, in general, less severely punished by voters at election time than non-nationalist parties, especially in coalition governments. However, this apparent advantage does not provide nationalist parties with longer periods in office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of candidates on voting behaviour in the regional elections of 2007 and 2011 in a number of Spanish regions (Autonomous Communities) included in the scope of the so-called 'dominant model of competition.' These are characterised by the total predominance of Spain-wide parties—and absence of any relevant nationalist/regionalist parties—in all electoral contests: Castile and León, Castile-La Mancha, Madrid region, Valencia region, Extremadura, La Rioja and Murcia region. Electoral research in Spain has focused mainly on the strong weight of ideology and party identifi cation in terms of voting behaviour, whereas the impact of the regional candidates themselves has not been analysed in so much detail. Using a series of logistic regressions, this study shows that approving of the regional leader is indeed one of the most signifi cant factors regarding voting decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyses and revises the latest Democracy Index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit in the United Kingdom. We analyze the changes produced in the index from 2006 to 2011, as well as in the five basic factors that constitute the index: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. The analysis of these factors --measured by sixty variables-- has made it possible to develop a new index, based on the data from 167 countries, and calculate a revised ranking. Countries have been classified into four types: democracies, flawed democracies, mixed systems, and authoritarian/totalitarian regimes. The new index permits a better understanding of the impact of the crisis through variables such as economic growth, human development, quality of life, corruption, and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the predictions of the election results for the Spanish Parliament published in the main Spanish newspapers. To gauge their degree of accuracy, the distance between the predictions and the actual results was defined and later assessed by comparing it with that of the so-called 'perfect poll'. This 'perfect poll' was generated by a simulation using the proportions of votes actually obtained by each party. Other issues related to the published polls are also analysed, such as the relationship between sample size and estimation quality, and between the error made (by excess or defect) for a party and the ideological affinity between that party and the newspaper publishing the survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is focused on the nationalization of political parties in Spain understood as the homogeneity of parties' electoral support across constituencies in a national election. The first part of the paper describes the evolution of nationalization from 1977 to the present and shows how the Spanish party system is increasingly nationalized despite the differences across parties. The second part seeks to explain party nationalization determinants. The analysis indicates that the votes received at national level increases party nationalization. The age of the party enhances national parties' nationalization while in subnational parties this variable has a negative effect, pointing to a trade-off between the two groups. Finally, the ideological distance in the left-right axis reduces national parties' homogeneity across districts while founding elections have no effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to understand the behavior of Spain's main media within a specific electoral context: the 2008 General Election. To this end, we analyzed the coverage of the major Spanish newspapers (El País, El Mundo and Abc) in order to determine whether their agenda setting and framing had political motives, in addition to the merely informative intention. Spanish media had at least two options within the context of the elections: to offer their readers a neutral coverage or, on the contrary, to taint it with obvious partisanship. Our findings demonstrate the predominance of the latter option. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the validity of different interpretative models of voting behavior in European elections in the light of the June 2009 results. First, we focus on models linking the European vote to national political concerns (Second Order model) and the domestic electoral cycle (Mid-Term model), and then we assess the capacity of a model based on the role of party positions and campaigning (Europe matters model) to explain occurrences which are at odds with traditional interpretations. Finally, we present a composite model in order to provide a more solid explanation of the 2009 European election results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes economic voting in decentralized contexts. The existence of several arenas of political competition allows for the appearance of vertical electoral contamination processes, implying that voters do not evaluate the performance of national and regional governments independently. Using the case of Spain in the period 1982-2008, it is demonstrated that this electoral contamination spreads from the national arena to the regional one, and not the other way round. However, electoral contamination tends to diminish as the process of decentralization takes place over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically reviews the conventional wisdom on the positive relationship between turnout and the electoral results of the PSOE in general elections in Spain. We highlight the existence of three causal mechanisms that give rise to different predictions about this correlation and therefore undermine the existing parsimonious thesis. Some of our arguments are empirically tested with aggregate district-level data corresponding to the ten general elections held to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use the method of counterfactual simulation to estimate the number of strategic votes transferred from the United Left (IU) to the Socialist Party (PSOE) in the last three Spanish general elections. The strategic voters we refer to are those who, in spite of IU being their first political preference, voted for the PSOE in order to attain representation benefits. The counterfactual simulation procedure is used to examine how the predicted individual probability of voting for a party changes when the strategic incentives at constituency level are removed. Our results lend support to the hypothesis that IU's electoral and parliamentary collapse was due in no small measure to the strategic behavior of its followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manipulation of the Spanish electoral system carried out by the political elites that led the political transition has been proved by several studies. This manipulation moves through the existence of a large number of low-magnitude districts and its interaction with malapportionment, the Hondt formula and, above all, the variance effect of district magnitudes. In this paper I will discuss another bias that has not yet been studied by researchers, and which also paved the way for UCD victories: the turnout bias. I will show how the manipulation of the electoral system led UCD to win systematically in the districts where there was low turnout and how its opponents won in districts with high turnout. Therefore the "price" of the seats for UCD was lower. This bias has remained and it favours those parties that have support in the districts with low turnout which are, at the same time, more overrepresented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the way in which voting decision combines factors regarding government performance and the representative nature of the rulers. We have selected four Spanish regions with different degrees of nationalism and different parties at autonomous regional and central government levels. Voters make decisions in a two-dimensional space (ideology and nationalism). We calculate the relative importance of each dimension and show that ideology affects all voters equally, whereas the nationalist dimension only affects nationalists. Using conditional logit estimation techniques, we analyse a 1992 survey of carried out by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, which shows us that (i) there is a coat-tail voting effect, so that the party in power is rewarded or punished at autonomous regional level, (ii) nationalist voters are more indulgent than non nationalist voters when they have a negative opinion of the regional government performance, and (iii) the more exclusionist the nationalism, the stronger this effect will be. We consider that these effects are due to the fact that nationalists vote on the basis of representation rather than government performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the shortcomings of the literature on strategic voting is the absence of empirical evidence in proportional representation electoral systems (PR systems). In this paper the existence of strategic voting in the 1996 regional elections in Andalusia is demonstrated using a pooled cross- section regression model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the psychological effects of the electoral system, paying attention to the influence that the size or magnitude of the electoral district has on the strategic use of the vote in the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados elections. In order to measure the incidence of the strategic vote on the behaviour of Spanish voters between 1982 and 2000, the various approaches proposed for studying this phenomenon are applied. The results make it possible to confirm that the institutional variable forming the electoral system - the size or dimension of the district, in other words the difference between large and small districts - has an influence on the behaviour of voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]