The electoral consequences of political disaffection in Southern Europe

The electoral consequences of the Great Recession seem to be one of the most attractive topics these days, particularly if the case selection focuses the attention on Southern European countries. Indeed, the results of the elections held in these countries between 2012 and 2015 deserve the attention. They have materialized the distance between politicians, democratic institutions and citizens through unusually high levels of volatility and changes in the party systems (Cordero and Montero, 2015; Teperoglou, Tsatsanis and Nicolacopoulos, 2015; Tronconi, 2015). However, this estrangement between political elites and citizens is not new in Greece, Italy or Spain. For long, this phenomenon was deemed a consequence of the high levels of political disaffection present in these countries (Torcal and Magalhães, 2010). To what extent is disaffection now having an impact in party choice during elections? The current crisis has hit the hardest in the aforementioned countries, not only in economic terms, but also in political terms. Skyrocketing rates of unemployment, high increases of public debt, and large budgetary retrenchment led to lower levels of welfare and the worsening of public services when these safety nets seemed most needed. Given the connection between the critiques to these policies and democratic attitudes (Teixeira, Tsatsanis and Belchior, 2014), we expect disaffection to become increasingly relevant at the electoral level, contrary to what Magalhães (2005) found for Portugal before the crisis period. Disaffected citizens have been described as politically alienated and disengaged amongst other attributes (Montero, Gunther y Torcal, 1997; van Deth and Martin 2004, Torcal and Magalhães, 2010). This alienation would lead citizens to refuse to become politically involved and to remain with their old choices rather than look for something new. Yet, the parties that are appearing in this context have strongly tried to appeal to this dissatisfaction. In other words, we not only expect that disaffection plays a role in party choice but that it can take two possible ways: either favor traditional parties, such as PSOE, PASOK, PD or ND, or the new parties, such PODEMOS, 5-SM or Syriza. Our research intends to contribute to further understand the role of disaffection in these countries and how is the protest of these citizens being voiced. To do so, we will look at the 2014 European Election using data from the European Election Study. The timing of the election and the methodology of the survey contribute to a better comparability of data. Preliminary results for Spain show that the current context has not only affected to disaffection but also increased the appearance of critical citizens. While disaffected voters seemed to prefer traditional parties, critical citizens where more willing to support new parties.