The Political Reaction of the Losers of Territorialization

How does territorial distribution influence electoral behavior and the political party system? Is it so important as to be the phenomenon that causes the emergence of re-centralizing parties? This paper examines this question by geolocating the inequalities of administrative boundaries in the case of Spain. Exploiting the quasi-federal distribution of Spain by Geographical Regression Discontinuity (GRD), I perform a natural experiment taking advantage of the variations in exposure produced by arbitrary administrative borders. I find that being more exposed to these variations increases the vote for recentralizing parties. The losers of territorialization, those whose assigned Autonomous Region does not correspond to the natural geographic region, maintain a greater predisposition to vote for recentralizing parties than their adjacent counterfactuals. This effect is not observed in the predisposition to participate in elections or to vote for traditional non-centralizing parties. Testing the effect of the difference in access to public hospitals as a mechanism of regional public services delivery, I find that this mechanism explains this increase in electoral support for centralizing parties.