Change and continuity in voting behaviour: An Analysis of the 2021 Catalan Regional Election

This paper analyses voting for secessionist parties and the non-secessionist parties in the 2021 Catalan elections with data for the Catalan government's Centre for Opinion Studies (CEO). The 2021 regional elections in Catalonia witnessed dramatic shifts among some parties but confirmed the fundamental division of Catalan politics into a bipolar bloc on the basis of the question of independence. This was the first Catalan parliamentary election where pro-independence parties won more than half the vote. The work uses the multistage explanatory model of voting behaviour to show that nationalist voting can be explained by long-term factors like identity as well as short-term variables like political and economic evaluations. The analysis finds that long-term variables explain more of the vote than short-term. The challenge come from Catalan nationalism to the Spanish Autonomous State is relatively permanent, regardless of short-term economic and political contexts.