José Ramón Montero

Democracy in Spain: Legitimacy, Discontent, and Disaffection

This article examines changes in perceptions of democracy in Spain over the last two decades. A variety of empirical indicators gleaned from numerous surveys are used to distinguish between democratic legitimacy and political discontent, as well as between this (which includes the well-known indicator of dissatisfaction with the way democracy works) and political disaffection. The article traces the different ways in which these attitudes have evolved in Spain over the last twenty years, and demonstrates that they belong to different dimensions. It also includes the results of two tests showing that these two sets of attitudes are conceptually and empirically distinct: a factor analysis confirms the distinct clustering of the indicators at the, individual level, whilst cohort analysis identifies different patterns of continuity and change across generations.

Against Bipartyism, Towards Dealignment? The 2014 European Election in Spain

The 2014 European Parliament (EP) election in Spain took place in a context of deep economic recession and distrust of political institutions. These conditions triggered an unprecedented electoral response through which Podemos, a radical leftist party created shortly before the election, obtained eight per cent of votes and gained electoral momentum thereafter, seriously threatening the two-party-plus system. Using data from a panel survey, our analyses reveal some unexpected findings. The intensity of protest voting and the timing of the contest within the national electoral cycle have had a major impact on national politics – with the possibility of eventually producing a party-system change.

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.

LA PARTICIPACIÓN POLÍTICA EN ESPAÑA: MODOS Y NIVELES EN PERSPECTIVA COMPARADA

This article proposes a new typology for modalities of political participation. It gives an empirical comparison of thirteen European democracies and suggests going beyond most used typologies. This proposal is built upon the discussion of two dimensions that have an important impact on such participation: the use of traditional representative or extra-representative mechanisms and the use of mechanisms based on ordered debate or on protest demonstrations. The interaction between these two dimensions enables us to distinguish five types of political participation: voting, contact, party activities, protest activities and consumer participation. The rest of the article compares the levels of these modalities in Spain and in some of its Autonomous Communities.

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.

Ciudadanos y partidos en el sur de Europa: los sentimientos antipartidistas

Este articulo explora las actitudes antipartidistas de los ciudadanos, un supuesto rasgo de las democracias occidentales tan frecuentemente aducido como escasamente estudiado. En el analisis empirico de cuatro paises del sur de Europa hemos encontrado que las orientaciones antipartidistas presentan dos dimensiones. Una de ellas, a la que hemos llamado antipartidismo «reactivo», parece cambiar en respuesta a circunstancias politicas coyunturales. La otra dimension, denominada antipartidismo «cultural», esta caracterizada por su estabilidad y su vinculacion con bajos niveles educativos y cotas reducidas de informacion politica.Y mientras que el antipartidismo reactivo no tiene implicaciones actitudinales o participativas significativas, el cultural parece formar parte de un sindrome mas amplio de desafeccion politica.

Confianza social, confianza política y satisfacción con la democracia. (Social Trust, Political Confidence, and Satisfaction with Democracy)

This article examines the relations among three crucial variables within the literature o social capital. It discusses the conceptualization of each of them and how to make them operational, and analyzes their mutual interactions and the role of other classical variables, such as voluntary associations, in their origins. The survey data come from the Citizenship, Involvement, and Democracy project, undertaken in 12 European countries between 1999 and 2002. The empirical findings run in the opposite direction to the patterns established in most of the literature regarding the relationships between social trust and political confidence, between social trust and satisfaction with democracy, and the arguments supporting the idea that voluntary associations create both social trust and political confidence. The implications of these findings are both methodological and substantive.

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...

Las Comunidades Autónomas como «arenas» de competición electora

En muchas ocasiones, Juan J. Linz ha subrayado con razón que la transición espaliola comprendía en realidad dos transiciones: la que transformó el régimen autoritario en un sistema democrático de corte occidental y la que sustituyó el Estado centralista por un Estado de las Autonomías de difícil catalogación (Linz, 1985). Pese a esta simultaneidad analítica, sus contenidos se desarrollaron por caminos relativamente diferenciados. Así, el extraordinario logro político de la transición democrática se ha venido celebrado unánimamente a medida que se suceden los aniversarios. Pero los acuerdos que hicieron posible el Estado de las Autonomfas han recibido juicios mucho más controvertidos. Tras el franquismo, la inmensa mayoría de los espafIoles mostraba un apoyo inequívoco a los principios democráticos; pero sus opiniones se hallaban profundamente divididas sobre las posibles soluciones del problema regional. Las propias élites políticas se hallaban igualmente divididas, como se evidenciaba en los niveles partidistas y electorales de competición. La articulación institucional de los mecanismos democráticos se sustanció en un conjunto válido y razonablemente preciso de reglas de juego, que las élites políticas acordaron a través de pactos consensuados e interpartidistas; pero la construcción del Estado de las Autonomías hubo de realizarse con dosis considerables de ambigüedades, incertidumbres y dilaciones. Mientras que el proceso democratizador podía contar con el impulso de la existencia de varios modelos en los sistemas políticos occidentales, el proceso descentralizador carecía de aquellos: las condiciones de partida del mapa regional español impedían la aplicación de los modelos consociacionales y federales’. Y si los retos y problemas a los que debía enfrentarse el despliegue de la vida política democrática eran importantes, los de la construcción del Estado de las Autonomías no se quedaban rezagados: las diferencias económicas, lingüísticas y culturales interregionales (y, a veces, intrar-regionales) podrían complicar extraordinariamente los objetivos de la integración nacional y política, así como convertirse en un cleavage fácilmente proclive a !a polarización, a las tendencias centrífugas y al crecimiento de la fragmentación (Linz, 1985: 529-530; Shabad, 1989: 2-4).