Three Decades of Elections in Spain: the Causal Chain Of

Home , Elections in Spain, The Left (Spain)

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

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).

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.

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 and political control over local areas (Chhibber and Kollman, 1998, 2004).

This differing supply of parties across elections has two crucial implications for the explanation of voting behavior. First, all else equal, when the number of parties entering the race changes from one election to the next one, the voting behavior of individuals also changes. However, if a regression is run, the explanation is not compelling. Suppose the distribution of voters shown in Figure 1. There are four parties entering the race, two left leaning parties and two right wing parties. Only the two individuals located in the position 1 of the left-right dimension vote for the extreme leftist party, while only the two individuals located in the position 10 vote for the extreme rightist party. Given that extreme parties are not included in the analyses, either because the number of observations is too low for running a regression with four values in the dependent variable or because the vast the vast majority of electoral studies in multiparty democracies dichotomize the electoral system into a pseudo-two-party contest, the Pearson correlation between ideology and voting for the two main parties in the sample of 38 individuals is 0.57. The estimation is biased since taking into the four most radical voters would reduce the correlation.

[Figure 1 about here]

However, the most relevant point for us is the comparison with the next election. If the extreme parties are non-viable, they should not enter the race. Accordingly, as shown in Figure 2, the two extreme leftist voters would vote for the main (now the only) leftist party and the same in the case of rightist parties. Now the Pearson correlation is 0.63. That is, the fit of our statistical model improves but we have no idea of the reasons of this improvement. We have a huge black box given that we are not aware of the specific point of the slope of party system fragmentation in which the election is located.

[Figure 2 about here]

In more general terms, this point is made by Katz and King (1999: 16-17) when they point out the problems of dichotomizing multi-party systems into a pseudo-two- party contest in order to use of standard statistical methods. As they write:

“the procedure is biased whenever all parties do not field candidates in every election district. For example, even when the governing party contests every election, different numbers of parties composing the "other" category will generally have large effects on a variable such as the percentage of the vote for the governing party. Because the vote a party expects to receive will normally be related to whether it runs a candidate, the observed variable will systematically overstate the true underlying support for the governing party when its true support is highest. Moreover, even if partially contested elections happen to cause no bias in a particular case, important information, critical to comparative politics, is always lost by these methods. For example, when the economic pain caused by promarket reforms in postcom-munist countries results in the reformers being thrown out of office … or when the increasing salience of ethnic divisions upsets the political order …, which parties benefit? How do the electoral fortunes of each of the parties depend on the degree of economic hardship or ethnic divisions?”

But the change in the number of parties entering the race does not only have this consequence based on the process of coordination of parties and voters. Parties‟ campaign strategies, including here the choice of policy positions, the salience of issues or appeals to encourage people to vote sincerely or strategically, is a function of the number and type of parties. In the previous example, and following the Downsian

7 spatial model, parties should move to the median voter‟s position. However, incentives are very different depending on the existence or not of minor leftist and rightist parties. This is precisely the point raised by Torcal and Chhibber (1997) when analyzing the emergence of the social class as a relevant variable in determining the vote between the two mayor parties in Spain, the PSOE and the PP. In the 1989 election, the PSOE stressed distributive measures such as raising retirement payments to the intersectoral minimum salary and extending unemployment insurance to a bigger percentage of the unemployed. According to Torcal and Chhibber (1997), the main reason for this strategy of moving to the left was the fact that the United Left, an electoral coalition to the left of the PSOE that included communist, doubled its vote share in three years at the expense of the socialists.

Does Spain fit with this argument? The slope of party system fragmentation in Spain since the founding election in 1977 is shown in Figures 3 and 4. Figure 3 displays the effective number of electoral and parliamentary parties across elections. As a consequence of the mechanical and psychological effects of electoral systems, the number of effective parties at the electoral and parliamentary levels in 2008 is significantly lower than in 1977 ―1.7 and 0.6 respectively. Additionally, the gap between the electoral and the parliamentary fragmentation is clearly reduced across elections: 1.6 in the founding election and 0.5 in the last election.

[Figure 3 about here]

The three parts of the slope of the party system fragmentation are apparent in Figure 4. It shows the gap between the effective number of electoral and parliamentary parties and the hypothetical difference, 0, that should be observed if a Duvergerian equilibrium (i.e., roughly speaking, only those parties winning seats and the first loser receive votes) was reached. Interestingly, the gap tends to decrease across elections: it is more stable (but still decreasing) after the 1993 election and it slightly increases in the 2008 election, when a new viable national party, UPyD, entered the race in the 52 districts of the electoral system. Why do the two slopes not converge? An immediate answer is that the assumptions of the Duvergerian logic are not satisfied (i.e., voters and parties are not short-term instrumentally rational and/or able to reliably predict losers in

8 advance and/or they behave expressively). An alternative explanation, built on the Duvergerian assumptions, would stress the role of contamination effects3: The dominant strategy of parties that are only viable in some districts of an electoral system can enter the race everywhere to do their best in the country as a whole. As a consequence, local party system fragmentation across districts will be more similar than what should be expected in a Duvergerian world (Ferrara and Herron, 2005; Lago, 2009).

[Figure 4 about here]

In Tables 1 and 2, we step forward to separate the strategic entry of parties and strategic voting. If parties decide whether or not to enter the race according to their chance of winning seats, once they can predict losers in advance (i.e., after the founding election), we should observe that „serious‟ parties do not enter a race when they are not viable. Table 1 displays the parties‟ entry decisions at the district level in four of the ten national elections held in Spain; in particular, in the founding and last elections and in two elections in the eighties. The analysis focuses on entry decision in election t of „serious‟ non-viable parties in election t-1. A serious party is a competitor garnering at least 1 percent of the vote. A 1 percent cutoff is arbitrary, but it does take us part way toward eliminating parties that are mere ephemeral protest movements (Ordeshook and Shvetsova, 1994: 104; see also Blais and Carty, 1991: 84). Additionally, viable parties in at least one district are excluded, given that they could enter the race in more districts due to the existence of positive externalities and/or economies of scale.

As expected, the maximum number of serious non-viable parties, 130, was reached in the founding election, while the minimum appears in the 2004 election, 29. The crucial role of information for strategic entry is strongly supported. In the 1979 election only the 7.7 percent of the serious non-viable parties entered the fray, that is, the process of learning to make votes count after the founding election is immediate. It is worth emphasizing that, although the supply of minor parties changes across elections

3 Contamination effects are present when the behavior of a voter, a party, a candidate, or a legislator in one tier/arena is demonstrably affected by the institutional rules employed in the other tier/arena (Ferrara, Herron and Nishikawa, 2005: 8). In counterfactual terms, contamination effects in the election in a given arena/tier are the difference between the effective results, subject to the influence of the electoral results in the other tier/arena, and the hypothetical results that would be produced if the former was the only election held in the country.

9 as the Duvergerian logic predicts, in every election some serious and minor parties enter the race. That is, some of them behave expressively or at least take a long-term view and then do not consider the perceived impact of their action on the final outcome of the election. For instance, 15 non-viable parties with more than the 1 percent of the vote in a given district in the 2004 election entered the race four years later, the 52 percent of all the parties facing the situation.

[Table 1 about here]

Given that some minor parties enter the race regardless of their victory chances, voters face with incentives to vote strategically. In Table 2, we have calculated the total aggregated volatility (i.e., vote transfers between successive elections), the volatility between viable parties and between non-viable parties in the first and last elections in Spain4. The more elections are held, the better the information about the relative chances of potential competitors and the higher the degree of institutionalization of the party system (Mainwaring and Torcal, 2006). Concerning this second element, the higher the degree of institutionalization, the lower the probability of change in the number of viable parties. As is well established in the literature, certain factors, such as strong psychological identifications, resulting from organizational encapsulation, cultural bonds, and the like, anchor voters making changes in voting support for a given party quite unlikely (Bartolini 2002: 93). As a result, in any given system, it is more likely to observe new viable parties before voters have become so inelastic to be unwilling to change their partisan voting preference if they receive a better offer. In other words, once voters have developed strong loyalties for parties, politicians, or ideological labels, or set voting habits, change is difficult and the likelihood that new parties will be viable is reduced.

Taken into account these two mechanisms, it can be hypothesized that (i) volatility should tend to decrease over time and (ii) the contribution of the volatility between viable parties to the total volatility should increase as elections take place, while the contribution of the volatility between non-viable parties should diminish.

4 In this analysis, parties are viable when they have won at least one seat at the national level.

The results in Table 2 strongly support our hypotheses. First, the highest total volatility is found in the first pair of elections, 18.27 points. Second, while in the first pair of elections the volatility between viable parties is the 31 percent of the total volatility, in the last two pairs of elections it is the lion‟s share. In sum, voters are increasingly strategic.

[Table 2 about here]

3. Parties’ campaign strategies The goal of this section is examining how parties‟ campaign strategies have changed over time, focusing our attention on the 1979 and the 2008 elections. By campaign strategies we understand the actions taken by parties to influence voters‟ decisions. If parties‟ campaign strategies differ over time, voting behavior should also differ. Given that campaign strategies depend on the particular political contexts faced by parties, we will start analyzing the 1979 and 2008 scenarios. Afterwards, campaigns strategies will be studied according to three variables: candidate‟s meeting, TV coverage and TV debates.

The very first thing to be noted is that, by 1979, the electoral map was not already settled. The first democratic election of 1977 had established a dominant political party, the centrist Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD) with the 34.44 percent of the vote and 166 out of 350 seats. It was followed by the social-democrat Partido Socialista Obrero Español, with the 29.32 percent of the votes and 118 seats. On the left of the PSOE, the Partido Comunista de España (PCE), obtained 1.7 million votes and the 9.33 percent of the vote and 19 seats, while to the right of the UCD, the conservative Alianza Popular (AP) got the 8.21 percent of the vote and 16 seats.

The “competition was particularly focused on the rural areas, on the moderate vote, and finally on those individuals who had voted for the Workers‟ Commissions in the trade union elections of January-March 1978” (Maravall, 1979: 304). In this trade union election, the communist trade union Workers‟ Commissions (CC.OO.) obtained about 3 million votes. Consequently, the strategy of the PCE was to attract those voters to their platform. In order to do so, the PCE included some leaders of the trade union

11 into their electorate lists; tried to obtain some of the PSOE‟s vote claiming that in order to see true socialism in power, and not social democracy, the votes should go to them.

The PSOE portrayed the UCD as a conservative right wing party, which maintained links with the former dictatorship regime. According to the socialist, the UCD was far away from the centre of the political spectrum and a UCD victory would lead to a conservative political order. On the left, the PSOE claimed for the „useful‟ vote, which translates as strategic voting (Lago, 2005)

The UCD, who had been governing since 1977, presented itself as a moderate, responsible party which had obtained very important achievements in an important contrast with the image the PSOE was promoting. The UCD portrayed the PSOE as a Marxist anti-religious party “with revolutionary ideas and irresponsible politics” (Maravall, 1979: 306). At the same time, the UCD also called for the „useful‟ vote against more right-wing smaller parties, saying that their vote would benefit the PSOE.

Both the UCD and the PSOE faced challengers from their ideological sides. However, these were not the only problems they faced. The UCD had a severe problem of institutionalization. The UCD was formed in 1977 as an electoral coalition “made up of a younger generation of politicians who had begun their careers within the previous authoritarian regime and collaborated with Adolfo Suárez in the transition, as well as some opposition leaders identifying as Christian Democrats, Social Democrats or Liberals” (Linz and Montero, 1999: 19). The UCD tried to institutionalize by transforming the coalition into a party; selecting Suárez as its President; adopting a catch-all model including all the ideological trends and creating an extensive organizational infrastructure. The elites of the UCD, however, were divided in the type of party they preferred, their ideological preferences and electoral strategies. More divisions aroused with the governmental action and the end of the politics of consensus.

The PSOE faced a very different problem: while some of its leaders showed moderation and responsibility in the constituent process and tried to attract moderate voters with the responsibility message, other leaders and party activists were more radical and showed a more revolutionary approach. Suárez took advantage of these two souls and the last night prior to the reflection day, prior to the election day, he appeared

12 on TV presenting “to the viewer with the following dilemma: either me or the chaos” (García Morillo, 1979: 233). The duality was solved in November 1979 when Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra eliminated „Marxist‟ in the Bad Godesberg of Spanish socialism (Maravall, 1979). But elections were held in March.

The situation in 2008 was radically different given that the party system was institutionalized. In 1979, the two biggest parties, the UCD and the PSOE, had the 64 percent of the votes and the 81 percent of the seats, while in 2008 the PSOE and the PP, former AP, had the 84 percent of the votes and the 93 percent of the seats. Similarly, in 1979 both UCD and PSOE had difficulties to present candidates in the 20 percent of the districts (García Morillo, 1979), while in 2008 they had no problems to enter everywhere. On the other hand, in 2008 the PP is the only party in the centre-right space due to the disappearance of the UCD; in the centre-left, the IU is a much weaker challenger than in 1979: while in the latter election it had the 9.33 percent of the vote, in the former election its support decreased to the 3.77 percent.

The main goal of the PSOE in the 2008 campaign was mobilizing voters –as in the 2004 election. The strategy consisted in the defense of the government achievements, emphasizing the image of the relatively well evaluated President Zapatero. Also, in some areas, like in Catalonia, there was an appealing to the „fear vote‟ where, the Catalan Socialists lemma was “If you do not go, they come back” -“Si tú no vas, ellos vuelven”- (Fernández-Albertos and Martínez i Coma, 2010).

The PP electoral strategy was to demobilize the potential socialist voters. In order to do so, the PP used the territorial debate, the failed negotiation with the terrorist group ETA, and, in the previous weeks of the election campaign, immigration and the worsening of the economic situation. In the words of Gabriel Elorriaga, the campaign director of the PP: “Our whole strategy is centered on wavering Socialist voters. We know they will never vote for us. But if we can show enough doubts about the economy, about immigration and nationalist issues, then perhaps they will stay at home” (Financial Times, 29th February, 2008)

Campaign effects and parties’ strategies

The strategies that political parties in electoral campaigns are contingent on the particular context of the election. If this is the case, how can we analyze campaign strategies without stating the obvious? This is, that since Spanish society has radically changed since 1979, so it has its campaign strategies.

There are two types of studies that have dealt with the impact of parties‟ campaigns on voting behavior. On the one hand, those analyses studying the influence of parties‟ direct contact with voters (Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1992; Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993). We have to discard this line of research in this paper since there are only two surveys publicly available for the 1979 election -one from the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) and the other one from the research by Richard Gunther- and none of them include the questions on contact by the party. On the other hand, those papers analyzing how the territorial distribution of the resources and the mobilizing efforts of the parties influence the votes (Cox, Rosenbluth and Thies, 1998; Criado, 2008). Since we lack any data on the territorial distribution of the economic resources, we alternatively focus on the allocation of a scarce resource during the election campaign which is the candidate meetings in the electoral circumscription that candidates address in their electoral intervention or the meetings that the candidates celebrate. Moreover, we also pay attention to two key elements of the campaigns that have radically changed the perspective of how electoral campaigns are driven in Spain: TV and electoral debates.

We are not including, however, some other elements like electoral programs nor campaign issues. The main reason for this is that such documents are not useful to analyze the campaign strategies that parties develop. An electoral program covers almost every issue in the society and it may be understood as a contract between the party elites and its voters (Criado, 2002). Moreover, the diffusion and knowledge of the electoral programs is, at best, scarce. By the same line of reasoning, we do not include „campaign issues‟ as a feature of the analysis of the campaign strategies: the messages that candidates send during the election campaign are limited since their interventions in TV are presented in sound bites.

Among all the possible strategies and actions that parties take, what is important for their electoral purposes is what citizens perceive and obtain from the parties. If we

14 assume that citizens mainly obtain the political information of the campaign from the parties through the media, we logically focus on the media coverage that TV made during the two election campaigns. In sum, we use campaign meetings with the main candidate, TV coverage and TV debates as the three criteria to analyze the campaign strategies.

Campaign meetings with the main candidates are key to understand the strategic use of the parties‟ resources. As is well known, an electoral meeting is a powerful signaling tool: a local sport stadium crowded with supporters of the political party injects moral and optimism to the locals and, through the TV images, to the rest of the country. However, it is a costly event in economic and organizational terms and, theoretically, the most relevant meetings require the presence of the main candidate of the party. An important change between 1979 and 2008 was the strategy of the Presidents. Suarez in 1979 did not celebrate many multitude meetings. His approach was more of presence in certain provinces: arriving, walking in the most popular areas talking to the people on the street; lunch or dinner with the local members of the party and move to the next destination. Many of his cabinet ministers applied a similar strategy and the press captured it. Leaving aside the aphonia Suárez suffered during the campaign, he visited less than 17 different provinces. President Zapatero in 2008 celebrated no less than 22 electoral meetings. These differences, it may be argued, are not striking since the Presidents while campaigning also are the Presidents and they still govern. The most important difference on the campaign strategy comes, though, in the attitude of the opposition. In 1979, Felipe González, held a frenetic activity and was almost ubiquitous with about 120 meetings around the whole country. Mariano Rajoy, candidate of the PP in 2008, visited 22 provinces, where a seat was at stake. Moreover, the campaign in 1979 had a more „bottom-up‟ and „sectorial‟ approach by which local organizations promoted and publicized their own agenda in the press, by 2008 this is not longer the case and a more centralized „top-down‟ perspective is imposed from the general headquarters of the political parties. This is not to say that local organizations do not keep their own local campaign initiatives but there is less local initiative.

Television coverage has also changed in the configuration of the different campaign strategies. There have been two main reasons for such a change. The first is the control of public television. It has been significantly de-politicized. Three examples

15 will clarify this point. First, as Maravall states “setting aside the informative slots allocated to each party, TV spent 2,268 seconds on UCD, 8 seconds on the PSOE and 16 on the PCE from 7 to 25 February” (1979:306). Second, Suárez, who had been the Director of the Spanish public television during the dictatorship of Franco, was aware of its influence and, while the visit of Olof Palme to Spain to commemorate the centenary of the PSOE did not appeared in TV, every minor figure of the UCD appeared in TV. A report by the newspaper „El País‟ (February 27th) measured the time and appearances in television showed that of the first 14 positions, the first thirteen were of the UCD members and 98,1 percent of the air time was occupied by the UCD members and a 1,03 percent by both the PSOE and the PCE. Third, as mentioned above, the night before the reflection day, Suárez final message warned that a vote for PSOE would be voting for Marxism and revolution. Such behavior in 2008 was, simply, impossible. Since 2004 the Spanish public television has been transformed and gained independence. Consequently, the Spanish public TV is more objective than it used to be and during the electoral campaigns the political parties in power cannot manipulate as bluntly as they used to. The second shift in television coverage is a structural change in the configuration of the media spectrum: while in 1979 there were only 2 public television channels, by 2008 there were these two public channels plus regional channels and private open channels. Since these are private corporations, they portray the electoral information in the way they consider most suitable and, consequently, the control of the parties would be lower than what it used to be. In a nutshell, Spanish TV has shifted from manipulation to a more liberal system of information conditioned by the informative relevance criteria and this has transformed the strategy, or at least the approach, that parties used to have with media.

The third element we use to analyze transformation of the campaign strategies is electoral television debates. Although electoral debates are a common practice in other democracies like Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Israel, Canada or the United States (Coleman, 2000), in 2008, Spain celebrated its second debates -the first were in 1993 between Felipe González and José María Aznar. In 1979 candidate González asked for a debate to President Suárez. His answer was that, in order to celebrate a debate with him, González had to "earn it". Obviously, the debate was not celebrated. The celebration of the debates may also affect the campaign strategy because of the amount of information they spread. Finally, debates allow the comparison of the different candidate's proposals

16 and generate high expectations and important audiences. Consequently, the dissemination of the information in an electoral debate may be different (and more effective by comparison) in an electoral debate than in many electoral meetings.

4. Voters’ predispositions The literature on voting behaviour and/or public opinion hinges on three diverging conceptions of citizens in democracies, conceptions which differ in accordance with their assumptions about citizens‟ political capacity (that is to say, the public‟s level of knowledge, understanding, and interest in political matters) (Dalton and Wattenberg, 1993; Jones, 2001: Ch. 3). First, much of the early literature on voting behaviour viewed voters as paws of social locations or their limited cognitive makeups. For the sociologists from the Columbia school, the causes of voting behaviour were to be found in groups: the vote was dictated by one‟s social position (Lazarsfeld et al, 1944). For social psychologist of the Michigan school, the focal point was the mediating role of long-term psychological predispositions, particularly party identification, in guiding citizens‟ actions (Canpbell et al, 1960). A second conception of the democratic voter, which may loosely be labelled as economic, asserts that individuals are instrumentally rational: they act in accord with their preferences for final outcomes and their beliefs about the effectiveness of the choice of actions open to them (Downs, 1957). Given that voters have very low incentives for informing themselves, they develop simplified ways of suing attitudinal factors, such as issue opinions and candidate evaluations, as a basis for their voting decisions. Finally, a new perspective on voters has emerged since the early 1990s. In this, voters are active decision makers but not fully adaptable to the current environment in their decision-making activities. They are, in sum, boundedly rational. Given that encyclopaedic knowledge is beyond their reach, the public may however muddle through by relying on a variety of sensible and mostly adaptive shortcuts (Lupia, 1994).

According to the conventional wisdom (Pitkin 1967; Fiorina 1981; Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin 1999), elections are mechanisms of sanctioning. For instance, “elections serve to hold governments responsible for the results of their past actions”, being accountability "a retrospective mechanism, in the sense that the actions of rulers are judged ex-post by the effects they have" (Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin, 1999: 29 and 225). Consequently, information is the key variable in this story: voters have to be

17 able to observe the government‟s performance, assigning political responsibilities and voting accordingly. In sum, "political control of public officials turns out to depend on (...) the degree of information of citizens" (Adsera, Boix, and Payne 2003, 478-479). Given that for the Columbia and Michigan schools voting behaviour is a function of long-term predispositions, accountability is only possible when voters are sensitive to short-term forces, that is, when voters are instrumentally or boundedly rational.

The goal of this section is twofold. First, we test whether Spanish voters behave accordingly to long or short-term predispositions. Second, because of the focus of the political behavior literature on the United States or, in more general terms, on first and second wave democracies, how voters‟ predispositions evolve over time in new democracies has been largely ignored by most researchers. Are voters increasingly elastic, allowing a better electoral control of governments, or increasingly inelastic, hampering the electoral control of governments? The availability of good survey data since the restoration of democracy in the seventies makes this analysis possible in Spain.

Given the crucial role played by information on electoral democracies, our analysis starts analyzing how informed Spanish voters are. In Table 3, we show the levels of factual political knowledge in a scale going from 0 (all responses incorrect) to 3 (all responses correct) in the second and the last two elections. As can be seen, voters have higher political information nowadays than in the transition to democracy. If the attention is focused on the comparison between 1979 and 2008, when the items have a quite similar difficulty, in the latter the level of information is almost 0.3 point higher than in the former. The difference is statistically significant at the .01 level. While the mode of the distribution of answers in 1979 is knowing only one item, the mode in 2008 is knowing two items.

[Table 3 about here]

Similarly, voters are much more capable to describe the general economic situation in the recent years than at the very beginning of the new democracy. As shown in Table 4, while the 10 percent of the individuals in 1979 and the 7 in 1982 answered “Don‟t‟ know” when describing the economic situation in Spain, only the 1 percent did

18 the same in 2008 and 2010. These differences are statistically significant at the .01 level. In sum, voters are in a much better condition nowadays to evaluate governments‟ performance than three decades ago.

[Table 4 about here]

Not surprisingly, the situation is exactly the inverse when examining long-term forces. First, the percentage of voters not able to say how close they feel to the three main national parties have substantially increase in the 2004 election in comparison with the 1982 election. As can be seen in Table 5, the percentage of “Don‟t know / No answer” goes from the 10 to the 15 percent in the case of the PSOE, from te 10 to the 14 percent in the case of the AP, and from the 10 the 20 percent in the case of the PCE/IU. In aggregate terms, the percentage of voters feeling “close or very close” to these three parties have also decreased.

[Table 5 about here]

Second, Table 6, where the percentage of voters not able to place themselves in the left-right scale is dispalyed, clearly supports this decreasing importance of long-term forces in explaining voter behaviour. In the 2008 election and, above all, the 2004 election this percentage is substantially higher than in the 1979 and 1982 elections.

[Table 6 about here]

5. Conclusions

This paper has shown the problems inherent to the 'variable political science' approach when explaining voting behavior. We have inspired in Beck when stating that "no theory of vote choice is complete without specification of the impact of context" (1986: 269). Particularly, a proper understanding of electoral behavior demands a close examination of the three links of the causal chain of electoral behavior: parties‟ entry decisions, campaign strategies and voter predispositions. Without providing the causal mechanisms, regression coefficients are a black box. As a third-wave democracy where

19 good survey data are available from the very beginning, Spain is an ideal case for testing the empirical and substantive implications of this causal chain-

First, the supply of parties tends to decrease across elections until an equilibrium is reached. That is, non-viable parties have virtually disappeared from Spanish politics as a consequence of the mechanical and psychological effect of the electoral system: the gap between the effective number of electoral and parliamentary parties has significantly decreases between 1977 (1.6) and 2008 (0.5). The role of information (or learning) is crucial here.

Second, regarding electoral campaigns, after describing the different contexts, we have centered in three elements. While the meetings of the main candidates and while the activities of the presidents seem to follow a similar pattern, the amount of meetings celebrated by the opposition has decreased. Regarding television coverage, we have seen that it has become more proportionate as elections have been celebrated. In other words, public television is less biased than it used to be. Additionally, we have considered the celebration of electoral debates and we have observed how in 1979, the socialists had to “earn it”, and the debate was not celebrated, while in 2008, there were celebrated two debates among the presidential candidates.

Finally, voters are increasingly elastic in Spain as time goes by. Probably as a consequence of having more information, long-term predispositions are less important in favor of short-term forces. Therefore, the conditions for electoral accountability are much better in 2008 that in the first election in the seventies.

References Adserá, Alicia, Carles Boix and Mark Payne (2003). “Are you being served? Political accountability and quality of government”. The Journal of Law, Economics & Organization. 19: 445-490. Bartolini, Stefano (2002). “Electoral and Party Competition: Analytical Dimensions and Empirical Problems”. In Richard Gunther, José Ramón Montero and Juan J. Linz (eds) Political Parties. Old Concepts and New Changes. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 84-110

Bartolini, Stefano and Peter Mair (1990). Identity, Competition, and Electoral Availability. The Stabilisation of European Electorates, 1885-1985. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beck, Paul Allen (1986). “Choice, Context, and Consequence”. In Weisberg (ed.), Political Science: The Science of Politics. New York: Agathon Press, pp. 241-83. Blais, André and Robert K. Carty (1991). "The Psychological Impact of Electoral Laws: Measuring Duverger´s Elusive Factor". British Journal of Political Science 21: 79-93. Brady, Henry E. and David Collier (2004). (eds.) Rethinking Social Inquiry. Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, y Donald P. Stokes (1960). The American Voter. Nueva York: Wiley. Cox, Gary W. (1997). Making Votes Count. Strategic Coordination in the World´s Electoral Systems. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cox, Gary W., Rosenbluth, France M. and Thies, Michael F. (1998). “Mobilization, Social Networks and Turnout: Evidence for Japan”. World Politics 50: 447-474. Coleman, James S. (1986). "Social Theory, Social Research, and a Theory of Action". American Journal of Sociology 91: 1309-1335. Chhibber, Pradeep and Ken Kollman (1998). “Party Aggregation and the Number of Parties in India and the United States”. American Political Science Review 92: 329-42. Chhibber, Pradeep and Ken Kollman (2004). The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Coleman, Stephen. (Ed.) 2000. Televised Election Debates: International Perspectives. New York: St. Martin‟s. Criado, Henar (2008). “The effects of party mobilisation strategies on the vote: The PSOE and the PP in the 1996 Spanish election”. European Journal of Political Research 47: 80-100. Dalton, Russell J., and Martin P. Wattenberg. (1993). "The Not So Simple Act of Voting". In Ada Finifter. (ed.). Political Science. The State of the Discipline II, Washington, D.C. American Political Science Association, pp. 193-218. Downs, Anthony (1957). An Economic Theory of Democracy. Nueva York: Harper. Elster, Jon (1989). Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Esser, Hartmut (1996). “What is Wrong with ´Variable Sociology´?”. European Sociological Review 12: 159-166. Fernández-Albertos, José and Ferran Martínez i Coma (2010). “Los efectos de la campaña y de los debates electorales” In José Ramón Montero e Ignacio Lago (eds.), Elecciones 2008. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. Ferrara, Federico, Erik S. Herron, and Misa Nishikawa (2005). Mixed electoral systems: contamination and its consequences. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ferrara, Federico and Erik S. Herron (2005). “Going It Alone? Strategic Entry under Mixed Electoral Rules”. American Journal of Political Science 49, 16-31. Fiorina, Morris P. (1981). Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fiorina, Morris P. (1997). “Voting Behavior”. In Dennis Mueller (ed.), Perspectives on Public Choice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraile, Marta (2008). Cuando la economía entra en las urnas: el voto económico en España (1979-1996). Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. García Morillo, Joaquín (1979). “El desarrollo de la campaña” in Las elecciones legislativas del 1 de marzo de 1979, de Esteban, Jorge and Luis López Guerra (eds.), Madrid, CIS. Gerring, John (2010). “Causal mechanisms: Yes, But …”. Comparative Political Studies 43: 1499-1526. Hedström, Peter and Richard Swedberg (1998). ¨Social mechanisms: An introductory essay”. In Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg (eds.), Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huckfeldt, Robert and John Sprague (1992). "Political Parties and Electoral Mobilization: Political Structure, Social Structure, and the Party Canvass." American Political Science Review (March): 70-86. Jones, Bryan D. (2001). Politics and the Architecture of Choice. Bounded Rationality and Governance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Katz, Jonathan N. and Gary King (1999). “A Statistical Model for Multiparty Electoral Data”. American Political Science Review 93: 15-32. King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba (1994). Designing Social Inquiry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lago, Ignacio (2005). El voto estratégico en las elecciones generales en España (1977- 2000): efectos y mecanismos causales en la explicación del comportamiento electoral. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. Lago, Ignacio (2009). “Magnitud de distrito y números de partidos”. Revista Española de Ciencia Política 21:9-23. Lago, Ignacio and Ferran Martínez i Coma (2010). “Why new parties?”. Party Politics Published online before print June 3, 2010, doi: 10.1177/1354068809346077. Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet. [1944] (1968). The People´s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Election. 3rd. ed. Nueva York: Columbia University Press. Linz, Juan and José Ramón Montero (2001). “The Party Systems of Spain: Old Cleavages and New Challenges” in Lauri Karvonen and Stein Kuhnle (eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments Revisited. London: Routledge. Lupia Arthur (1994). “Shortcuts Versus Encyclopedias: Information and Voting Behavior in California Insurance Reform Elections”. American Political Science Review 88: 63-76. Mainwaring, Scott and Mariano Torcal (2006)."Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory After the Third Wave of Democratization". In Richard S. Katz and Willliam Crotty (eds.) Handbook of Political Parties. London: Sage Publications, pp. 204-27. Maravall. José María (1979). "Political Cleavages in Spain and the 1979 General Election". Government and Opposition 14: 299-317. Przeworski, Adam, Susan C. Stokes, and Bernard Manin (1999) (eds.). Democracy, accountability and representation. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press. Ordeshook P. C. & Shvetsova. O. (1994). “Ethnic Heterogeneity, District Magnitude, and the Number of Parties”, American Journal of Political Science 38: 100-123. Pitkin, H. F. (1967). The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Popper, Karl R. (2002). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Routledge. Riker, William H. (1982). “The two-party and Duverger‟s law: an essay on the history political science”. American Political Science Review 76: 752-766. Rosenstone, Steven and Mark Hansen (1993). Mobilization, participation and democracy in America .Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sorensen, Aage B. (1998). “Theoretical mechanisms and the empirical study of social process”. In Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg (eds.). Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 238-266. Torcal, Mariano and Pradeep Chhibber (1997). “Electoral Strategies, Social Cleavages, and Party Systems in a New Democracy: Spain". Comparative Political Studies, 1997: 27-54.

Table 1: Parties‟ entry decisions in Spain Elections 1977-1979 1982-1986 1986-1989 2004-2008 Non-viable parties* 130 44 81 29 Non-viable parties 10 22 51 15 entering the race (%)** (7.7) (50.0) (63.0) (51.7) *Parties with more than the 1 percent of the votes in a given district en the first election and without representation in any districts. **Entering the race in the second election.

Table 2: Strategic electoral volatility in Spain Elections Total Volatility Volatility Volatility % Volatility between viable between non- between viable parties viable parties parties 1977-79 18.27 5.73 12.54 31.36 2000-04 11.98 9.94 2.04 82.97 2004-08 6.28 3.96 2.32 63.06 Expressed as a percentage, the volatility index measures the net difference between the results obtained by parties in two successive elections; see Bartolini and Mair (1990, 20 ff). It is calculated as the sum of individual party gains and losses divided by two. The index yields a scale from 0 to 100, corresponding to the net shift in voting percentages. A 0 signifies that no parties lost or gained vote (or seat) percentages, while 100 means that all the votes (or seats) went to a new set of parties.

Table 3: Information in the 1979 and the 2008 elections in Spain Information* 1979 2004 2008 Election election election 0 4 3 5 (188) (75) (303) 1 46 11 22 (2496) (275) (1309) 2 27 31 45 (1469) (812) (2739) 3 24 55 28 (1286) (1767) (1726) Total 100 100 100 (5439) (2929) (6077) Mean** 1.71 2.46 1.97 (Std. deviation) (0.87) (0.77) (0.84) (Entries are the percentage and the number of individuals in brackets). *It is an index of factual political knowledge going from 0-all responses incorrect to 3- all responses correct. In 1979 the three items were: “Do you happen to remember the name of the President of Government in our democracy?”; “Do you happen to remember the name of the leader of Comisiones Obreras [the main trade union in Spain]?; and “Do you happen to remember the name of the president of the Congress of Deputies?”. In 2004, the three items were: “Do you happen to remember the name of the President of government in your Autonomous Community?”; “Do you happen to remember which political party had the highest number of seats in this election?; and “Do you happen to remember if the invasion of Iraq was authorized by United Nations, or decided by the United States, Great Britain, Spain and other countries without the authorization of United Nations?”. In 2008, the three items were: “Do you happen to remember the name of the Spanish President of government before José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero?; In what year was the Spanish Constitution approved?; and Do you happen to remember if the Socialist Party had an absolute majority in its last term of office (2004-2008)? **The difference of means (0.16) between the 1979 election and the 2008 election is statistically significant at the .01 level (t = 12.39).

Table 4: Description of the present economic situation in Spain (% Don‟t Know / No Answer) Year** 1979 1982 2004 2008 2010 (November) (April) (November) (February) (September) 10 7 2 1 1 (118) (86) (42) (25) (20) (Entries are the percentage of Don‟t know/No answer and the number of individuals in brackets). **The difference of means between 1979 and 1982 and 2008 are statistically significant at the .01 level (t = 30.29 and t = 32.83, respectively). Source: 1203, 1309, 2581, 2754, and 2844 CIS barometers.

Table 5: Closeness to parties in the 1982 and 2004 elections 1982 Election 2004 Election % Very or % % Very or % Fairly Close DN/NA Fairly Close DN/NA PSOE 55 10 42 15 (2981) (572) (1204) (409) PP 27 10 21 14 (1471) (568) (521) (303) PCE/IU 15 10 19 20 (839) (570) (630) (586) Source: 1982 Data postelection survey and 2004 Metroscopia postelection survey.

Table 6: Placement on the left (1) – right (10) scale in four elections (% Don‟t Know / No Answer)* Elections 1979 1982 2004 2008 13 12 19 14 (758) (664) (1022) (864) (Entries are the percentage of Don‟t know/No answer and the number of individuals in brackets). Source: 2004 and 2008 CIS postelection surveys and 1979 and 1982 Data postelection surveys.

Voting Behavior Main Leftist Main Rightist Extreme Leftist Extreme Rightist Party Party Part Party

10 10

9 9

8 8

Left-Right ideology 7 7

6 6

5 5

Left-Right ideology Left-Right 4 4

3 3

2 2

1 1

Figure 1: Voting behaviour and the supply of parties (1)

Voting Behavior Leftist Party Rightist Party

10 10

9 9

8 8

Left-Right ideology 7 7

6 6

5 5

Left-Right ideology Left-Right 4 4

3 3

2 2

1 1

Figure 2: Voting behaviour and the supply of parties (2)

Figure 3: Effective number of electoral and parliamentary parties in Spain, 1977-2008

Figure 4: The slope of party system fragmentation in Spain, 1977-2008