Three Decades of Elections in Spain: the Causal Chain Of
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THREE DECADES OF ELECTIONS IN SPAIN: THE CAUSAL CHAIN OF VOTING BEHAVIOR Ignacio Lago Universitat Pompeu Fabra Department of Social and Political Sciences Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27 Tel.: +34 93 542 2266; fax: +34 93 542 2371 08005 Barcelona, Spain [email protected] Ferran Martínez i Coma Instituto Juan March de Estudios e Investigaciones Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Ciencias Sociales c/ Castelló 77 28006 Madrid, Spain [email protected] Paper prepared for the Conference on “Comportamento eleitoral e attitudes políticas em Portugal: 2002-2009” Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa Lisboa, November 22-23, 2010 2 1. Introduction The study of electoral behavior has been characterized as “the largest” (Fiorina, 1997: 391) and “the most scientific field in political science” (Beck, 1986: 241). With the advent of the high-speed computer and statistical sampling theory, the widespread use of rich sources of data and quantitative methodologies have made possible a huge accumulation of knowledge in the form of verifiable or falsifiable statements in election studies (Riker, 1982; Popper, 2002). However, this increasing use of statistical techniques has also fostered the development of a variable-centred type of theory in electoral behaviour that only devotes a scant attention to explanatory mechanisms1. This „variable political science‟, by analogy to the so-called „variable sociology‟ (Esser, 1996), is based on the notion that electoral behaviour can be explained by various individual and contextual determinants. The purpose of such analysis is to estimate the causal influence of the various variables representing these determinants (Coleman, 1986)2. Not surprisingly, running a regression, the best way to establish robust covariation between variables, have turned into the analytical strategy to have a satisfactory explanation of electoral behaviour, while the „cogs and wheels‟ (Elster: 1989: 3) that have brought the relationship into existence are not particularly important. The shortcomings of this „variable political science‟ in electoral behaviour can be illustrated with, by far, the best analysis of economic voting in Spain. Using a pooled-cross sectional analysis of individual survey data, Fraile (2008: chapter 7) finds that the effect of voters‟ retrospective judgements about economic policies on the probability of voting for the Socialist Party (the ruling party) is weaker in the 1996 election than in the 1993 election. In other words, one coefficient is higher in one election than in the other and this difference is statistically significant. But how was this differing relationship brought about? Is it because new coordination processes have taken place? Because parties have changed their campaign strategies? Because voters are much more elastic as elections go by? Or simply because of a measurement error? The implications for a proper understanding of the relationship between the economy 1 See Hedström and Swedberg (1998) and Sorensen (1998) for a broader discussion. 2 This is also the position defended by King, Keohane and Verba (1994) in their path-breaking handbook on research design and the main reason for the forceful reaction that can be found in Brady and Collier (2004), for instance. See Gerring (2010) for further details. 3 and the vote are obviously very different depending on the specific mechanism playing here. Unfortunately, no answer is provided in the book. This is the usual black-box explanation in our field as a consequence of a variable-centred type of theorizing. Electoral democracy rests on a straightforward idea: citizens elect their fellow citizens to represent their interests. However, the “not so simple act of voting” (Dalton and Wattenberg, 1993: 193) is the result of a complex causal chain with several links and actors involved that are far from being constant across elections. First, citizens‟ choices cannot be understood without first attending to the entry decisions made by party elites. Without understanding where this menu of choices comes from, it is impossible to full understand voter behavior. Before the election occurs, political parties have to decide in every district whether they enter the race alone, engage in some form of pre-electoral coordination or stay out. Since electoral coordination primarily depends on the capabilities to predict the chances of the competitors, and party elites and voters learn who is in condition to win seats as time goes by, their behavior is not the same across elections. If the supply of parties differs, voting behavior should also differ. Second, once parties enter the race, they have to define their campaign strategies to influence voters‟ decisions. That is, they have to select policy positions, define the salience of issues, allocate their resources across districts or selecting their candidates. Again, there are no reasons to expect that parties follow the same campaign strategy election by election. If parties‟ campaign strategies change, voting behavior should also change. Finally, once the menu of choices is closed, citizens have to decide whether they vote or not, first, and second, those who vote have to choose a given party. As Dalton and Wattenberg (1993: 193-194), “any discussion of voting behavior is ultimately grounded on basic assumptions about the electorate‟s political abilities ─the public‟s level of knowledge, understanding, and interest in political matters”. Given that voters‟ predispositions shift over time, assuming a fixed effect of these predispositions biases the explanation of voting behavior. When voters‟ predispositions change, voting behavior is not the same. In sum, although we do not deny the existence of stable patterns of electoral behavior, at the end of the day “every election is different. Candidates and issues change … the dominant issues were not identical in any two elections … The composition of the American electorate has varied significantly by age, race, and partisan affiliation during this century … Sometimes even the parties are different” (Beck, 1986: 263). 4 The goal of this paper is to examine the factors that shape electoral behavior in mass elections, in particular the three links of the causal chain: parties‟ entry decisions, parties‟ campaign strategies and voters‟ predispositions. Without a full understanding of how the interaction between party‟s strategy and citizens (i.e., the pathway(s) through which Xs might affect voting behavior) (Gerring, 2010: 1500), we are prisoners of the naïve “positivist” view that causality (and explanation of voting behavior) is simply a probabilistic association between X and Y. Running a regression with exactly the same specification in every election captures this positivist view in our field. Our paper is based on the study of elections in Spain. As a third-wave democracy where good survey data are available since the first election in the seventies, Spain makes possible analyzing voting behavior since the very beginning: we can estimate how our three variables, parties‟ entry decisions, parties‟ campaign strategies and voters‟ predispositions, change since the founding election observing then the entire slope of the variables. The article is organized as follows. In the next section, we show differences in the supply of parties across elections. Then, it follows an analytical description of how parties‟ campaign strategies have changed over time. Later we discuss voters‟ predispositions. Finally, we present some concluding remarks and suggestions for further research. 2. The supply of parties The number of parties within countries over time is neither constant nor monotonic (i.e., it increases or decreases over the entire range). The slope of party system fragmentation can be divided in three parts. First, given that entering the electoral fray is costly, once political actors have good information about the relative chances of potential competitors, the number of parties within countries tends to decrease over time. Candidates prefer not to invest resources when they believe that they will surely lose and, therefore, their dominant strategy is withdrawal; and if non- viable parties enter the race, voters abandon them for strategic reasons (Cox, 1997). In sum, after founding elections, the slope of the equation in party system fragmentation is negative. 5 Second, if electoral systems or population diversity do not change, the number of parties in a given country tends to an equilibrium in which “the number and type of parties that voters are willing to vote for turns out to equal the number and type of parties that are willing and able to stand for election” (Cox 1997: 8). The slope would be 0 or flat (i.e., there are no changes in the number of parties across elections). Finally, the equilibrium is not necessarily the end of the story. Sometimes, new viable entries take place. Then, the slope in the equation of the number of parties is positive until a new equilibrium is reached and the slope is flat again. The entry of new viable parties requires that a significant number of voters change their behaviour in a coordinated way. There are three key variables that might explain successful entries: electoral market failures (i.e., the existence of unsatisfied political demands shared by a significant number of individuals), the number of elastic voters available to change their partisan preference if they receive a better offer (i.e., the degree of institutionalization of party system) (Lago and Martínez, 2010) and the degree of economic