This study examines how ethnic media — outlets producing content in a minority language — affected the rise of ethnic parties. The case focuses on the late Franco regime in the Basque Country, where an independent radio station run by local clergy promoted a revival of the Basque language through entertainment and cultural programming.
Do radical right parties need to distance themselves from past right-wing authoritarian regimes to win votes? This study probes the reputational cost, if any, of association with anti-democratic regimes, and the paper confronts challenges that make that cost hard to observe.
Vicente Valentim (BJPS) investigates what keeps political norms — shared beliefs about which opinions and behaviors are socially acceptable — in place within democracies. The study focuses on norms against radical-right preferences, a well-established boundary in many democracies, and asks how ordinary citizens detect and enforce breaches of those norms.
Ranjit Lall asks how anxiety shapes voting behavior during societal threats and argues that anxiety is not a single emotion but a family of socially contingent concerns that can produce competing political alignments. The study addresses why some voters gravitated toward parties advocating strict COVID-19 lockdowns while others moved toward parties opposing restrictions, and what this reveals about emotional drivers of issue voting.
Do problems with government performance change public support for democracy? This study reports results from a 2022 survey experiment of nearly 2,000 residents in Spain that used short writing prompts to make respondents think about two types of poor government performance—corruption or unemployment—and, for corruption, whether it was framed as caused by elites or by the system. The paper examines whether these prompts shift attitudes toward democracy measured both as broad democratic support and as support for specific democratic practices.
Question and Theory: Why do individuals join civil wars? Quantitative literature has largely emphasized material incentives, while qualitative, historical, and ethnographic studies point to nonmaterial, ideological motives. A formal model of recruitment is developed in which potential fighters trade off ideological commitment against material payoffs when deciding whether to enlist.
This article argues that individuals who support a stigmatized party face incentives to hide that preference. Political stigma is defined as a situation in which people perceive social norms against a political preference, and those perceived norms can reshape both public behavior and private responses.
Direct political control over firms has diminished due to regulation, yet political connections persist. This study explores an alternative channel: electoral cycles influencing corporate appointments.
Does direct democracy lead to smaller government budgets? Using regression discontinuity design on Spanish municipalities where voter choice dictated governance style, this paper finds that the switch to direct democracy reduces public spending by about 8%. However, revenues decline similarly resulting in no change to budget deficits. These findings suggest voters use direct democracy to control special-interest influence.
This article examines how government support responds to social welfare rhetoric and spending in Britain, Spain, and the United States.
Spanish local elections provided a natural experiment to compare voter turnout under different systems.