Spain Elections: Right-Wing Advantage Explained

The choice of this system was altogether less futile. The decision, 47 years after the approval of the Spanish Magna Carta, continues to have a transcendent effect on the electoral life of the State. As is well known from existing research, the ruling elite chooses an electoral system and rules that allow it to stay in power. They try to do their best not to leave the reins of the state, especially in transitions, such as the Spanish one, in which the establishment of the authoritarian regime is in charge of designing the transition to democracy.

A well-known anecdote illustrates this: a journalist asked Pío Cabanillas, then undersecretary of the Ministry of Information and Tourism (of which Manuel Fraga was in charge), which party he predicted would win the first elections. “I don’t know who, but we will win”, was the answer. The strategy of electoral engineering (we could also call it manipulation) was put into practice by designing an electoral system that favored the ruling elite. Thus, a system was designed that would give the Democratic Center Union (UCD) the absolute majority of seats with 30-33% of votes, a figure that most polls gave them. The initial proposal was changed from 4 seats to 2 per province because it equated small districts with large ones too much. The guarantee of a victory was one of the reasons, according to many of the protagonists of the time, for the very creation of UCD. The rules of the game were so important that almost none of the opposition amendments were accepted.

Although the general election is held on the same day, experts often talk about three subeleccions: those of small (1 to 5 seats), medium (6 to 9) and large (10 or more) districts. The dynamics in each are very different and have generated important biases: the first, the creation of an electoral system that benefits the majority parties (more than half of the districts have less than 5 seats); the second, the initial overrepresentation of rural and more conservative areas (where the UCD hoped to get better results); and the third, the fact that low voter turnout, driven in part by the electoral system, usually benefits conservative parties.

The value of a vote in Spain

These majoritarian and conservative biases are not necessarily inevitable. For example, the rural areas of Mexico or Peru, less populated and overrepresented, were more left-wing. And some urban and populated areas, and therefore underrepresented, are not always left-wing, as for example in the case of Madrid. According to a recent study by political scientists Pablo Beramendi (Duke), Carles Boix (Princeton), Marc Guinjoan (UAB) and Melissa Rogers (Claremont) in which 247 elections in 65 countries are compared, the Spanish electoral system is one of those that generates a greater conservative bias, that is to say, it overrepresents especially the PP (formerly UCD and AP) and, to a lesser degree, Vox. Given that the electoral system is the same in Catalan elections, the biases in our country also occur, despite the differences in the party system and the fact of using the provinces as electoral districts, limits that are not consistent with the territorial (and historical) reality of Catalonia. This, however, is already figs from another basket.

The curious graphic of the week

Bad election results… logo changes

In September Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya decided to update its graphic image. Twelve years after the last change, the party decided to renew the colors, the spelling and other elements of the logo. According to the Political Parties Logo Database, tweaking the party logo is quite common. Since 1980, in the 17 countries and 157 parties considered, it has happened more than 600 times. The most common practice is to change the image (over 300 times) or the letter (270), while changing the color of the political formation is much less common. It also varies by country. Thus, while in the Spanish state there have been new logos in only about a quarter of the elections, in Iceland or Finland it is more common for the electorate to come across a rebranding of most political formations.