Nationalist parties and voting in the Balearic Islands Pedro Riera (Carlos III University of Madrid:
[email protected]) 1. Introduction This chapter attempts to shed some new light on the electoral performance of nationalist parties in the Balearic Islands. The vote for this group of political actors, at least in Western Europe, has been traditionally explained by the role of a regional identity that is different from the dominant type of identity in the state in which that nationalist vote takes place (Perez-Nievas and Bonet 2006). It is not the purpose of this piece to question the validity of this explanation but to complement it by analysing the relevance of other potentially important factors that could explain the vote for these parties in the Balearic Islands. For this reason, I will briefly analyse the role played by other variables such as ideology and short- term evaluations. One of the aims of this chapter is therefore to explore the relative weight of regional identities in determining the vote for parties whose main focus is not Spain in the Balearic Islands. The main alternative explanation I will look at will be based on spatial models of electoral behaviour. Ever since the path-breaking work of Anthony Downs (1957), this type of approach has been traditionally adopted in electoral studies. Researchers have adapted the spatial model to the analysis of political systems in which more than one type of national identity coexist by arguing that in such cases electoral competition takes place in a two- dimensional space: the classical left-right spectrum and an additional continuum on which one might place the electorate’s preferences in terms of national identity.