Spanish elections and politics II: Catalan elections on February 14, 2021

[palandio]

The PSC is back, but it's a different party.

Back in 1999 and 2003 elections, when the PSC was the leading party in popular vote under Pasqual Maragall (CiU won more seats due to malapportionment), 30% of its base had a predominantly Catalan identity ("more Catalan than Spaniard")

The 2021 PSC under Salvador Illa has lost 2/3 of the catalanist base: only 10% identify as "more Catalan than Spaniard".

The catalanist middle-class has turned to sovereigntism since 2010

To what extent have the PSC taken most of the C’s voters from the last election? The map would suggest that this is basically what has happened.

This is basically what happened among certain voters, but do remember that a good number of these voters were either PSOE/PSC voters previously (the Red suburbs around Barcelona for example) or hopped on the train in the 2019 federal elections.

So it was essentially a combination of being able to consolidate the less right-wing anti-independence vote and riding the national party’s increased popularity since 2017, as well as passions around the independence issue having somewhat cooled since the very heated circumstances in which the last election was held?

Turnout fell from 79.1% to ca. 53-54%, i.e. almost one third of 2017 voters stayed at home in 2021, which means that C's -> abstention, JxCat -> abstention and ERC -> abstention were probably numerically the strongest voter movements. When all votes are counted, PSC will have gained a mere ca. 40k votes on top of its 607k votes in 2017. Significantly CUP was able to more than double its seat share despite getting less overall votes than in 2017.

[palandio]

Precinct map from eldiario.es:

https://www.eldiario.es/catalunya/resultados-elecciones-catalanas-calle-calle-consulta-gano-manzana_1_7220231.html

Very interesting!

What are the reasons that in many precincts with strong PSC results (and strong 2017 C's results) the ERC is relatively strong (often in second place) whereas Junts is basically non-existent? Who are these voters? Are they like most of their neighbors when it comes to language, class, family history, etc.?

[palandio]

Precinct map from eldiario.es:

https://www.eldiario.es/catalunya/resultados-elecciones-catalanas-calle-calle-consulta-gano-manzana_1_7220231.html

Very interesting!

What are the reasons that in many precincts with strong PSC results (and strong 2017 C's results) the ERC is relatively strong (often in second place) whereas Junts is basically non-existent? Who are these voters? Are they like most of their neighbors when it comes to language, class, family history, etc.?

The explanation may well be more complicated than this, but wouldn't you expect a place that leans left unionist-speaking to also lean left separatist-speaking?

Good point. In the end if you did a principal component analysis on the precinct results you would probably get two main components (left-right and unionist-separatist) and then it would be completely logical for a precinct in the left-unionist quadrant to have ERC in second place (and sometimes ERC and Vox fighting for second place).

Class is probably correlated with the components, too, with the gradient generally going from poor left-unionist to wealthy (or rural) right-separatist, but with a non-linear bent at the end that puts right-unionist areas in Western Barcelona on top.

But I was also trying to immagine the voters behind the numbers and that's why I originally asked the question.