Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Preferences for Political Coalitions in Spain

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13608746.2012.701900

1743-9612

Albert Falcó-Gimeno,

Political Systems and Governance

Abstract Spanish political parties opt whether or not to form alliances with other parties for a number of reasons, one of which is the coalition preferences of their voters. This work explores to what extent party preferences and ideological proximity on the two main dimensions of political competition in Spain affect voters' coalition preferences. Using survey data from 2009, we find that voters' coalition preferences are greatly affected by ideological proximity, especially on the left–right axis, whereas decentralisation preferences are much more salient for the supporters of regionalist parties. However, this general pattern varies depending on the coalition being assessed. Keywords: Coalition GovernmentsCoalition PreferencesIdeological ProximityPreferences for DecentralisationSpatial ModelsSpain Acknowledgements The author thanks the comments and suggestions received from the participants in the various meetings of the research group 'Spatial Models in Political Science' of the Juan March Institute (Madrid) held between 2009 and 2011. Notes [1] González et al. (2008 González, R., Manzi, J., Saiz, L. J., Brewer, M., De Tezanos-Pinto, P., Torres, D., Aravena, M. T. and Aldunate, N. 2008. Interparty attitudes in Chile: coalitions as superordinate social identities. Political Psychology, 29(1): 93–118. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) argue that in countries like Chile attitudes towards coalitions are more salient and even predictive of party preferences, since they tend to be stable, enduring, and effectively form significant opposing blocks. However, in most multi-party systems such as Spain they tend to be less salient, unless they exist as current or very recent governments. [2] PSOE is the largest Spanish social-democratic party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español). PP is the largest conservative party (Partido Popular). IU stands for Izquierda Unida, the leftist nationwide party (formerly communist). The survey data come from the 2799 study of the Spanish Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS). The averages are weighted by territorial representativeness. For more details about the Spanish political landscape see the introduction of the special issue (Sánchez-Cuenca & Dinas 2012). [3] CiU (Convergència i Unió) and ERC (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya) are two Catalanist parties, the former considered to be centre-right and the latter to be left-wing. PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco) is the largest regionalist party in the Basque Country, typically considered to be Christian-democratic and centre-right. A more elaborate treatment of the regional party systems in Spain is provided in Amat's article in this special issue. [4] The potential coalitions do not include PP–IU because it is not a credible governmental agreement. Also, UPyD is left out of the analyses due to the reduced number of cases in which the preferred coalition was either PSOE–UPyD or PP–UPyD, and above all the very small number of 2008 vote recalls for and identifications with that newly created party (founded in 2007). Finally, hereafter, REG refers to regionalist parties. [5] The expected preferences for single-party minority governments of PSOE and PP voters assume that this type of cabinet leaves their party more room to pursue its desired policies, closing deals with this or that partner depending on the specific policy and circumstances. [6] The alternatives with UPyD as a partner are dropped from the analyses. See note 4. [7] These averages are clearly a very rough account of what would be the ideological position of each coalition. Any weighted average (e.g. by electoral or seat share), though, would create problems in differentiating between coalitions given the much larger size of the two main parties with respect to the others. In any case, from a rank-ordering perspective, the unweighted averages make sense. [8] All analyses are corrected using a sampling weight for the territorial representativeness of the survey, which denotes the inverse of the probability that the observation is included because of the sampling design. [9] This dependent variable is based on a question that is only asked to those who in the first place oppose single-party absolute majorities. As a consequence, the estimates in columns 5 to 8 of Table 2 may suffer from a sample selection bias. Accordingly, we ran a Heckman probit in which the selection equation determined the preference for non-absolute majorities and the outcome equation was the preference for coalitions vs. single-party minority cabinets. Nonetheless, the post-estimation Wald tests never allowed the rejection of the null hypothesis of independence of equations. This is why we opted for the presentation of two separate equations for each model. Heckman probits are available from the author upon request. [10] Local polynomial smooth plots with confidence intervals. The results displayed in traditional estimates' tables are available from the author upon request.