Explaining change in linguistic voting: The case of Catalonia

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the evolving impact of linguistic voting and its relationship with values and preferences in Catalonia. Our central argument posits that both bottom-up and top-down dynamics serve as complementary and interactive explanations for ethnolinguistic voting. On the one hand, it could be expected that, over time, the influence of language on party choice would diminish as Catalan became more widespread among the population. On the other, we expect polarisation to push in the opposite direction, increasing the significance of language in party voting through national identity, strategically activated by political elites. We empirically demonstrate that language has remained a strong predictor of the nationalist vote using data on regional elections in Catalonia from the Center for Sociological Research (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, CIS). We show that a key mechanism accounting for this relates to parties' strategies to shape the linkage between language and identity, thereby polarising the political competition.