Ignacio Lago

Rational Expectations or Heuristics? Strategic Voting in Proportional Representation Systems

The process of formation of electoral expectations in proportional representation systems is analysed in this article. Contrary to Duvergerian or electoral coordination theories, by using survey and in-depth elite interview data from Spain in the 1970s and 1980s, it is shown that strategic voting depends on heuristics (i.e. extrapolations from the previous election) rather than on rational expectations. The main implication is that strategic voting is possible in large districts.

Why new parties

The variables explaining party system fragmentation have been investigated extensively, but little is known about changes in the number of parties over time within countries. This article is an attempt to fill the gap by explaining the entry of new viable competitors in party systems after the founding election. Using empirical evidence from Spain, we show that when there is an electoral market failure and a high number of perfectly elastic voters, there is a high probability of new viable entrants.

The 2004 Election in Spain: Terrorism, Accountability, and Voting

This article explores the impact of the March 11 terrorist attacks in Madrid on the election for the renovation of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate on March 14, 2004, which led to the defeat of the conservative government of the Popular Party and the inauguration of the Socialist Party (PSOE) government. It examines the extent to which the terrorist attacks changed the voting preferences of Spaniards, and if they did, to what extent they are a necessary and sufficient factor when explaining the defeat of the party in government. The authors answer these questions by discussing the predominant interpretations of the impact of terrorism on electoral choices; analyzing the causal mechanisms behind the impact of terrorism on the electoral results and their empirical relevance; assessing the robustness of these causal mechanisms through different data and arguments; and looking not only at the question of what but also to the issue of how much, using a counterfactual statistical analysis to quantify the impact of the attacks on the election results. On the basis of the analysis of various polls, they conclude that the attacks did not change the voting preferences of Spaniards; rather, voting choices were influenced by negative views of the governments support for the invasion of Iraq and government manipulation when informing the public about the responsibility for the attacks before the elections. Thus, the PP defeat was not caused by the terrible attacks per se, but by the working of the basic mechanisms that ensure democratic accountability. Because the majority of Spaniards felt that the government did not respond to their demands or policy preferences, they punished it at the ballot box.

The 2006 Regional Election in Catalonia: Exit, Voice, and Electoral Market Failures

This paper analyses the results of the 2006 autonomous election in Catalonia and their implications for Spanish politics. In accordance with the analytical framework provided by Hirschman (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Harvard University Press, 1970), and using individual and aggregated data, we show that demands shared by a significant number of voters were unsatisfied in this election, provoking an electoral market failure and a consequential rise of exit (or abstention) and voice (or blank and null votes and voting for new parties). All these behaviours are symptoms of both an increasing level of political discontent and a lack of political integration due to a divergence between issues salient to Catalans and the dominant focus of party platforms and agendas.

Defining and measuring party system nationalization

In this paper, we propose a new measure of party system nationalization based on a minimalist definition of the phenomenon. A perfectly nationalized party system is a party system with only national parties or, in other words, without sub-national parties. Instead of the homogeneity of parties’ vote shares or the number of parties throughout the country, our measure captures the aspirations of parties to be national whose proxy is the proportion of districts (weighted by seats) that a party runs a candidate. The measure is compared with existing indicators through a longitudinal analysis of 256 elections in 18 Western European countries from 1945 to 1998.

Assessing the Mechanical and Psychological Effects of District Magnitude

Abstract District magnitude is a central aspect of the institutional context in PR elections, and it influences parties’ and voters’ strategies. The incentives for strategic behaviour are stronger in smaller districts, as only large parties are likely to be viable. This article investigates how much the vote is affected by this characteristic of the electoral context, focusing on the 2005 and 2009 Portuguese elections. Portugal is one of the countries with the largest degree of variation in district magnitude and represents thus an ideal case for analysing district magnitude effects. Relying on data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, this study shows a strong mechanical effect of district magnitude and a limited psychological effect.

The 2005 Autonomous Election in Galicia: the End of Conservative Hegemony1

Abstract In this paper, the results of the 2005 autonomous election in Galicia are analyzed. After a review of the political context and the campaign, we present and analyze the results at electoral and institutional level explain the main reasons behind the defeat of the Popular Party after 16 years of absolute majority in the Galician Parliament and discuss its implications for the political system at the Galician and Spanish levels.

Strategic voting in proportional representation systems: Evidence from a natural experiment

Relying on data from a natural experiment in Spain, I produce an unbiased estimate of the extent to which strategic voting occurs in multi-member districts. I show that voters have fully adapted to the different incentives provided by distinctive electoral systems in Spain since the first election and also that they behave strategically only when the opportunity to do so is present. That is, contamination effects do not seem to exist when voting strategically.

Más votos y menos escaños: el impacto del sistema electoral en las elecciones autonómicas catalanas de 2003

Resumen es: En este articulo revisamos (1) los mecanismos electorales que explican las victorias en escanos, pero no en votos, de CiU en las dos ultimas elecciones a...

Turnout and social fractionalisation

Social fractionalisation has been omitted in most influential cross-sectional studies on turnout, and when it has been included, evidence is, at best, mixed. This article addresses this gap from two perspectives. First, using aggregated data from 22 countries we show that turnout is inversely related to ethnolinguistic fractionalisation, even after controlling for institutional, political and socioeconomic determinants. Second, we rely on data from elections in two multilingual territories, Catalonia and Quebec, to examine both the direct and indirect causal mechanisms for which voting and the sense of duty of vote are affected by the individuals’ aversion to the opposite ethnicity and the relative size of ethnicities. Analyses show that those relatively more averse to mixing with others who are different to themselves have a lower propensity to vote and are less likely to construe voting as a civic duty when they belong to the minority group.