Birth and (potential) death of a young party in Spain: Case Study of Ciudadanos through ecological inference

One of the consequences of the economic and institutional crisis that took place in Spain due to the outbreak of the international financial crisis of subprime mortgages in 2008 was the fragmentation of the party system. The usual coexistence of two large political forces (PP and PSOE), which alternately held the presidency of the Spanish Government, with small political forces mostly from a non-state level (ERC, PNV, among others), has been broken to make way for new political parties, which channel social discontent towards the model of economy and democracy in force in Spain since the democratic transition. Such is the case of Ciudadanos and Podemos. After the crisis of the independence movement in 2017, another political formation emerged with a presence in the Spanish parliament that was also critical of the economic and political system of the seventies, such as Vox. Voters show a new dynamic of electoral behavior, marked by volatility, which materializes in a fragmented party system (Roig, 2019). This paper studies the case of Ciudadanos in the Region of Andalusia, where Ciudadanos was part of the regional coalition government in 2018. Through the so-called vote transfer matrices, it is studied the origin of the Ciudadanos’ votes and the destination of those who gradually lose from their first participation in a general election in 2015 to the present, taking into account the Andalusia regional electoral appointments. Thanks to ecological inference and a new algorithm, rslphom, designed to maximize the precision of estimates at the local level (Pavía and Romero, 2022 and 2023), this research aims to identify the profile of Ciudadanos voter groups based on data aggregated according to their political origin (that is, if they come from the PP, for example), and their level of income broadening the analysis that the surveys allow based on the memory of voting and the intention of the electorate. The main starting hypothesis is that Ciudadanos voters in Andalusia belong to all social strata, and their majority voted for the Socialists before. The second hypothesis is that the Andalusian voters of Ciudadanos are changing their electoral option for the popular candidacy, despite being originally socialist. Pavía, JM. and Romero, R. (2022). Improving estimates accuracy of voter transitions. Two new algorithms for ecological inference based on linear programming. Sociological Methods and Research, online available. Pavía, JM. and Romero, R. (2023). Data wrangling, computational burden, automation, robustness and accuracy in ecological inference forecasting of RxC tables, under review. Roig, R (2019). Valencian-style Coalition Government: el Botànic. Debats: Revista de cultura, poder i societat, 134: 1, 155-169.