Ignacio Jurado

Party system nationalisation and social spending

Party systems diverge in their levels of nationalisation. While in some countries parties obtain similar levels of electoral support in all districts, in others parties get very asymmetric electoral shares across districts. The distributive consequences of this have been seldom studied. The argument tested here is that when political parties have nationalised electorates they have stronger incentives to provide social policies that spread benefits all over the territory. This argument is tested in 22 OECD democracies for the period 1980-2006. The results show that, regardless of the electoral system in place, there is a positive relation between party system nationalisation and social spending.

Passing the buck? Responsibility attribution and cognitive bias in multilevel democracies

Abstract This paper explores the effect of national partisanship and Euroscepticism on individuals’ causal responsibility attribution in European multilevel democracies. It is particularly focused on the average differences in responsibility attribution in federal and non-federal states, as well as in countries belonging to different European Union enlargement waves. Using a pooled dataset of the 2004, 2009, and 2014 European Election Studies, results show that when poor economic outcomes are at stake, partisans of the national incumbent in federal states are more likely to assign responsibility to regional governments following a blame-attribution logic, while this logic is absent in non-federal states. Likewise, Eurosceptic individuals are more likely to assign responsibility to European authorities when they hold negative views of the economy and they belong to countries that have been European Union members for a longer period.

Geography Matters: The Conditional Effect of Electoral Systems on Social Spending

There is a large body of research showing that the provision of social policies is higher under proportional electoral systems than under majoritarian systems. This article helps advance this literature by showing that the geographic distribution of social recipients plays an essential role in moderating the impact of electoral institutions on social provision. Using data from twenty-two OECD countries, the results show that majoritarian systems increase the provision of social spending when recipients are concentrated in certain regions. When levels of concentration are high, social spending in majoritarian countries can surpass levels of provision in proportional representation systems.

Allocating Campaign Effort in Spain: Evidence from Four General Elections

Abstract This paper analyses which districts are targeted by Spanish political parties in their electoral campaigns. We find that the major Spanish parties - PP and PSOE - mobilise districts where they are more likely to win a new seat or are in danger of losing one they already hold. The predicted closeness of the district race is more relevant in the smallest districts. We also find that Spanish parties mobilise their strongholds. We suggest that, apart from the pure office-seeking strategies, political finance motivations might also play a role in the mobilisation choices made by Spanish party elites.

Economic crises and the nationalisation of politics

The literature on party system nationalisation has yet to provide a better understanding of the impact of short-term factors upon the nationalisation of politics. This article helps to fill this literature gap by analysing the effect of economic conditions on party system nationalisation. The argument is that economic crises will decrease levels of nationalisation by amplifying territorial variation in preferences for redistribution, limiting political parties’ capacity to coordinate divergent interests across districts and triggering the emergence of new political forces. Data on 47 countries for the 1960–2011 period confirm this hypothesis and show that lower economic growth during the years prior to the election is associated with a decrease in levels of party system nationalisation in the next election. The result is robust to variation in the specification of the econometric model and to the use of different measures of nationalisation. Results also show that federal institutions increase the impact of economic conditions on the nationalisation of politics, whereas any moderating effect of electoral system proportionality on the economy is not found.

Strategic voting and non-voting in Spanish elections

The literature on strategic voting has provided evidence that some electors support large parties at the voting booth to avoid wasting their vote on a preferred but uncompetitive smaller party. In this paper we argue that district conditions also elicit reactions from abstainers and other party voters. We find that, when ballot gains and losses from different types of responses to the constituency conditions are taken into account, large parties still benefit moderately from strategic behaviour, while small parties obtain substantial net ballot losses. This result stems from a model that allows for abstention in the choice set of voters, and uses counterfactual simulation to estimate the incidence of district conditions in the Spanish general elections of 2000 and 2008.

Fiscal Deficits and Type of Government: A Study of Spanish Local Elections

The literature on public choice has largely argued that when several actors are part of a decision-making process, the results will be biased towards overspending. However, the empirical studies of the effect of minorities and coalition governments on spending have yielded mixed support for this theoretical claim. This chapter argues that the inconclusiveness of the empirical evidence is related to problems of standard regression models to accurately capture unobserved heterogeneity. We use data from Spanish municipalities for the period 2004–2011 to compare the results of four typically used estimation methods: mean comparison, OLS, fixed-effects regression and matching. We argue that out of these models, matching deals better with unobserved heterogeneity and selection bias of the type of government, allowing us to reduce estimating error. The results show that, when we account for these problems in a matching model, minorities run lower surpluses than single party majorities. This result did not arise in simple mean comparisons or OLS models, or even in the fixed-effects specification. These results give support to the law of 1/n (Weingast, Journal of Political Economy 96: 132–163, 1981) and also underscore that in order to identify correctly the impact of government characteristics on policy-making, we need to understand that these are not randomly assigned across our units of observation. This advises the use of more quasi-experimental methods in our empirical research.