Three keys to understanding polling day in Spain

The election year began with the general election this Sunday, April 28. In these elections, many issues were discussed (territorial model, economy or social policy) and others absent, such as Europe.

At the same time, the parliamentary arc is drawn more fragmented than ever before, with many factors making these elections a new turning point in a complex process of changing the Spanish party system.

In order to understand all these changes, we badyze the elections to the Congress and the Senate in Spain through three keys:

Over the last few days, the various parties have asked their constituents for a mobilization effort. This question is particularly important in the left-wing bloc, which, although it is generally thought that it gets better electoral results when participation is high, but the academic literature does not find a cause-and-effect relationship.

However, it seems that all parties, regardless of their position on the left-right axis, have strongly chosen to encourage participation, which has been restored compared to previous elections and has achieved the best result since 2004.

The discussion on this question oscillates between two contradictory hypotheses on the effect of mobilization on participation.

– On the one hand, the badumption that a high mobilization capacity of a party can lead to the mobilization of voters from other parties to counter it.

– On the other hand, the badumption that the answer of the voters of the least mobilized party would be the demobilization, reflection of the frustration.

These elections also allowed more than 100,000 disabled people to exercise their right to vote. A news celebrated by various disability rights groups as an important step forward in political rights and freedoms.

Ensuring a fair electoral process is fundamental in a democracy. This ideal of fair play during the elections was compromised by false news.

Debates on this issue have evoked the power of outside agents to interfere in elections, the context of the practical impossibility of controlling ubiquitous social networks, the responsibility of the media and the role of public and private entities. for electoral campaigns as fair as possible.

Finally, we again discussed the extent to which it always made sense that elections were not allowed in the days leading up to the elections. It is alleged that the existence of voting companies abroad, whose procedures are particularly opaque, would contaminate this over-protection of Article 69.7 of the Organic Law of the General Electoral System. On the other hand, the polls would have worked quite well in the face of a public opinion which tends to give them a value lower than their actual performance, even recently.

Finally, during these elections, we witnessed yet another rebalancing of the Spanish party system, which until recently tended to crystallize in highly homogeneous semi-cycles according to a two-party logic. However, after the 2015 elections, the new partisan offer managed to federate the voters according to different logics ranging from economic factors to disaffection.

In these elections, the multiparty model would be setting up, with a major crack in the right bloc that could hardly form an alternative government to the progressive bloc.

The recurrence of the pacts policy debate would reinforce the idea that the parties in Spain have understood that governability is no longer possible without the support of other forces. This further suggests that it would be unlikely that the parties in Spain would move to a badly called "second round" because it would result in a high cost difficult to justify citizenship.

Concentrating again at the polls could lead to a result not very different from that of this election. Thus, the parties would be obliged to understand each other, trying to solve the problems inherent in the formation of coalition governments, either by combining the leftist parties of the state (PSOE and United Podemos) with separatist parties such as ERC , or by a left center pact between the PSOE and Ciudadanos.

Joan Carles Pamies Palazuelo: Researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Visiting researcher at the Center for European Studies (Sciences Po, Paris). Autonomous University of Madrid

Originally published in The Conversation.