The economic bases of the emergence of new parties: the case of Podemos and Ciudadanos in the Spanish 2015 general election

This paper examines the influence of economic crisis on voting preferences for the Spanish emerging parties (Podemos and Ciudadanos). We use a pooled dataset which includes five waves of the CIS barometer from October 2014 to October 2015 (the period previous to the 2015 general election) and we develop a multinomial model which compares the attitudinal voting antecedents of these two emerging parties with respect to the two traditional big ones (PSOE and PP). We find three results which may be relevant both for the literature on the emergence of new parties and for the understanding of contemporary southern European politics. Firstly, a negative evaluation of the country economic situation seems to have a generous impact on the vote for the two emerging parties when compared to the two traditional big parties. These effects persist even controlling for attitudinal variables such as ideology, territorial preferences and vote recall, in three of the four comparisons. Secondly, in addition to the poor economic performance, the perception of corruption also plays a crucial role in order to understand support for the two emerging parties with respect to the two traditional big parties. And this explicitly political role persists even controlling for the alluded economic effects. And thirdly, both the evaluation of the country economic situation and the perception of corruption strongly interact to account for the emergence of both Podemos and Ciudadanos. That is, the impact of the economic evaluations on the vote for the two emerging parties is higher among those voters who worry about corruption. Our findings have several important consequences for the literature. We empirically verify that the emergence of new parties in southern Europe has an economic basis, but also show that this propensity is not uniform. We provide empirical evidence about the importance of political factors – such as corruption – and show that these factors are not suppressed by the economic factors. And we also show the way these two factors interact in order to finally give rise to the new parties. This paper fits reasonably well in the first of the possible themes for panels which were included in the CfP (Electoral Re-Alignment and Party Politics).