Selected Publications
Revista Española de Ciencia Política, 2024. With Sonia Alonso. Open access.
Spain’s mainstream right parties immediately cooperated with the radical right Vox as a support party for minority governments when it first entered regional parliaments in 2018 and 2019. We ask why the mainstream right opted to engage the radical right to govern and why the latter agreed. Only when we consider parties’ regional and national goals can we explain why the parties allied in Spain, and then only when we consider electoral as well as policy and office goals. We argue that centrifugal two bloc competition in the party system and electoral competition among the mainstream right parties on territorial and national identity issues encouraged engagement. Further, we show how the right bloc developed and solidified and how Vox constrained mainstream party choices by pushing for public recognition. It demonstrates the value of examining subnational politics, not only as another arena, but also as integral to party strategies.
The 2023 Elections in Greece and Spain: Evolving Party Systems in Post-Crisis Southern Europe
Journal of Common Market Studies, 2024. With Susannah Verney. Open access.
The 2023 elections in Greece and Spain showed that Southern Europe could still surprise. Greece experienced significant change, with the unexpected collapse of the official opposition presaging the emergence of a predominant party system. However, predictions that Spain would become the next European country with far-right government participation were not fulfilled. These elections took place a decade and a half the start of the European debt crisis which sorely tried these countries' political health. They signalled a new phase in the evolution of the post-crisis party systems.
Minority Governments in Comparative Perspective
Oxford University Press, 2022. With Shane Martin
Approximately one-third of parliamentary democracies are or are typically ruled by a minority government - a situation where the party or parties represented at cabinet do not between them hold a majority of seats in the national legislature. Minority governments are particularly interesting in parliamentary systems, where the government is politically responsible to parliament, can be removed by it, and needs (majority) support in the parliament to legislate.
The chapters in this volume explore and analyze the formation, functioning, and performance of minority governments, what we term the why, how, and how well. The volume begins with overviews of the concept of and puzzles surrounding minority governments in parliamentary systems and establishes the current terms of the debate. In the thirteen chapters that follow, leading country experts present in-depth case studies that provide rich, contextualized analyses of minority governments in different settings. The final chapter draws broader, comparative-based conclusions from the country studies that push the literature forward and outline directions for future research on minority governments.
A Strike against the Left: General Strikes and Public Opinion of Incumbent Governments in Spain
Political Studies, 2022. With Alison Johnston and Kerstin Hamann
Political links between labor unions and leftist political parties have weakened over the last four decades in Western Europe, reducing the former’s influence on the latter. Unions’ prolonged organizational decline suggests that their capacity to pressure left parties should become more limited. We examine whether unions can use general strikes to influence public opinion when left parties in government pursue austerity policies. Executing a distributive lag time series analysis of quarterly public opinion data from 1986 to 2015 in Spain, we find that Socialist governments incurred significant public opinion penalties in the wake of a general strike. Not only did PSOE prime ministers lose confidence from the public, but they also witnessed a significant reduction in voting intentions. In contrast, Spain’s conservative governments incurred no such public opinion penalties in response to general strikes. We conclude that general strikes carry significant political costs for left governments that stray from union ideals.
VOX Spain: The Organisational Challenges of a New Radical Right Party
Politics and Governance, 2021. With Astrid Barrio and Sonia Alonso. Open access.
This article examines the organisation of VOX, a new radical right party in Spain. It shows that the party has taken early and uneven steps to build a mass organisation and initially opted for open membership recruitment with participatory organisational elements. Also, the party’s rapid growth and quick entrance into political institutions at different state levels led the party leadership to establish more centralised control and limit members’ prerogatives, though recruitment continued. Centralisation in part responds to organisational needs given the party’s quickly acquired political relevance, but also to the desire of the central party leadership to forestall the articulation of territorial interests, or prevent them from escaping their control. Today, VOX exhibits elements of mass party organisation and highly centralised decision-making in the hands of national party leaders.
Ministers, Gender and Political Appointments
Government and Opposition, 2021.
This study examines whether the sex of the selector matters for advancing women's inclusion in politics and how the political context shapes selectors’ preferences and behaviour. It focuses on an under-researched area – the political appointments ministers make in their ministerial departments – and thus sheds light on the conditions under which women access appointed office. It analyses six governments in Spain between 1996 and 2018, using a mixed methods approach that includes statistical analyses of political appointments and interviews with former ministers. It finds that women ministers, as individuals, did not appoint more women than men ministers did at any time. However, women's presence is highly relevant. In more gender-balanced political contexts, men and women ministers appointed more women. Moreover, the context changed, in part because critical political actors pushed for it. This imbued a new political sphere, subcabinet-appointed offices, with representational significance.
The Push for Independence in Catalonia
Nature Human Behaviour, 2018. With Astrid Barrio
In 2017, Catalonia unilaterally declared independence from Spain. The independence push was not simply a bottom-up process wherein citizens increasingly demanded independence. Catalan political elites were more radical than voters and competitive outbidding to win hegemony in the pro-independence camp fuelled the independence push.
Minority Governments in Spain: Government Strengthening Institutions in a Multilevel State
In Minority Governments in Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Minority governments are predominant in Spain. Spain had either single-party majority or minority governments between its transition to democracy in the mid-1970s until a minority coalition formed in 2020. This chapter examines why minority governments form, how they govern, and how well they perform in Spain. Regarding formation, contextual factors during the transition to democracy and historical legacies from the 1930s encouraged single-party minority governments in the early years of the new regime. Political actors also established institutions and practices to make single-party minority governments a viable governing formula. The formation, functioning, and performance of minority governments also intertwine with the relevance and nature of regional parties and the decentralized state. Regional parties have little interest in governing Spain, yet want to receive policy concessions, further state decentralization and political support to govern their regions. In addition to multilevel exchanges, the study examines the government’s majority-building strategies in parliament and the use of office-based concessions to allies. Finally, the chapter seeks to explain why Spain’s minority governments have often performed as well as their majority counterparts, and why recent minority governments have governed with greater difficulty. It highlights three factors: political institutions, the government’s partisan bargaining position, and the reconcilability of party goals.
Spain: The Development and Decline of the Popular Party
In Riding the Populist Wave: Europe’s Mainstream Right in Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2021). With Sonia Alonso
This chapter analyses Spain’s mainstream conservative party, the Popular Party (PP). Of the two revolutions analysed in the book – the silent and silent counter-revolutions – the Popular Party only confronted the former for several decades. In general, it adapted to a more liberal society by moderating to capture centrist voters in the 1990s without losing far right voters, thereby remaining hegemonic on the right. Midway through the subsequent decade, Spain’s two main parties, the Socialist PSOE and PP, moved further apart on post-materialist and centre–periphery issues. Today, PP is severely weakened and ideologically sandwiched between two right-wing party challengers, the more centrist Citizens and the far right Vox. This political fragmentation is due to a favourable opportunity structure for the rise of new parties after 2010 – related to the Great Recession, political corruption and the push for independence in Catalonia. In this context, PP was unable to retain its diverse electorate. It now confronts dilemmas similar to those of many of its European counterparts, and the party’s initial response to the rise of Vox was to move rightward and accommodate it as an ally.
Spain: Single-Party Majority and Minority Governments
In Coalition Governance in Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 2021).
This chapter examines governments in Spain, which stands out in comparative European perspective. Between its transition to democracy in the 1970s and 2019, it did not have a coalition government. Instead, governments were either single-party minority or majority ones. It was not until 2020 that Spain had its first coalition government—a minority one. This chapter reviews the institutions relevant to the life cycle of governments, the parliamentary party system and changes therein, and the record of government formation, governability, and government termination until 2018. In comparative perspective, Spain’s governments before 2015 generally formed rather easily, governed without great difficulty, and were quite stable. In contrast, the party system change in 2015 led to severe difficulties of government formation and governability.
In The Oxford Handbook of Spanish Politics (Oxford University Press, 2020).
This chapter explains the functions and working of Spain’s parliament, las Cortes Generales. More specifically, it first analyses parliament’s place within the constitutional system, and representation related to political parties, women and other minority groups, and citizen trust. It then outlines parliament’s internal organization, including asymmetric bicameralism, parliamentary party groups, and committees. Finally, it discusses the characteristics of law-making, and executive–legislative relations in this parliamentary regime, before briefly concluding. While parliamentary institutions in Spain have changed little since redemocratization, throughout, the chapter highlights the (potential) transformations of legislative politics as a result of changes in the parliamentary party system.
