The Voter Bases of Podemos and Vox

Until very recently, Spain appeared to be one of the few EU countries where right-wing populist parties did not play any political role. This was especially notorious when considering that Spain has been one of the countries hardest hit by the Great Recession. The Andalusian regional elections of December 2nd 2018 put an abrupt end to this Spanish quasi-excepcionallity, with a strong and unexpected entrance of Vox, a populist radical right party. Thus, following a pattern that other Southern European countries have already experienced, the Spanish party system in the near future will include populist parties of different ideological orientations. The first semester of 2019 is packed with electoral contests, ranging from general elections at the end of April to concurrent European, regional and local elections at the end of May. These electoral contests will provide plenty of micro-level data to study in detail the voter bases of Podemos and Vox once it has become clear that both parties are relevant players in the Spanish political landscape (at least, this is what all the polls predict). In this paper, we study the voter bases of Podemos and Vox in several electoral arenas: what are the similarities and differences between the social bases of Podemos' and Vox' voters? To what extent are these social bases contingent on the election level? How importance is the concurrence of elections in the mobilization of voters of each party? How do split-ticket voting in the May 28th elections affect the profiles of their voters in the European, regional and local elections? And the different electoral incentives among different election levels? In answering these questions, special attention will be paid to the comparison with the M5S-Lega and the Syriza-Golden Down cases in Italy and Greece, respectively.